Meta’s Forum – Meta’s new Forum app for iPhone brings Facebook Groups into a dedicated space and adds an AI chatbot under an “Ask” tab. After logging in with a Facebook account, users get a feed shaped by groups they belong to and suggestions from groups they don’t, while th
When Meta first shut down its Groups app in 2017. it left a gap for anyone who wanted the “community” side of Facebook to feel separate and searchable. Now. the company is trying to close that gap with Forum—an iPhone app that pulls Facebook Groups into a dedicated home. then layers in an AI chatbot designed to answer questions using what people have actually posted.
Forum is built like a hybrid of familiar social feeds and the new shape of AI discovery. After logging in with a Facebook account, the app automatically brings in the groups a user is already part of. Those groups’ posts populate the main feed, and the app also surfaces suggestions from groups the user isn’t in. The result feels close to the way a Reddit feed mixes communities you follow with communities you’re nudged toward—though without Reddit’s pseudonymity.
Groups don’t sit front and center in standard Facebook. so it doesn’t take much to understand why a dedicated app matters. In Forum, you don’t just scroll past group content buried elsewhere. You get a feed focused on groups. plus a mini version of your Facebook profile that shows only your group posts. There’s also a way to browse new groups and post directly to specific ones.
The sharpest change is where the AI comes in. Forum’s AI chatbot lives under the “Ask” tab. Instead of sending users out to ChatGPT or adding a “reddit” label to a search engine query. the chatbot provides AI-generated responses that pull from posts across various Facebook groups. The connection is meant to mirror how Google’s search results and AI overviews can pull from licensed content on the internet. except here the source pool is Facebook groups.
To test it, the app was used to ask questions about Magic: The Gathering. The chatbot referenced posts from Magic groups the user said they were part of. and it also suggested groups in the user’s area of New Jersey. Importantly. the results included the posts the AI was drawing from—users can tap those references to view the full conversation around each post.
Meta communications manager Feryal Hemamda confirmed the Forum launch in a statement to The Verge: “We test lots of new products publicly to see what people find interesting and useful to their experiences across our apps.”
The flow of Forum’s pitch is hard to miss: groups become the feed. and groups become the retrieval layer for the chatbot. Once those two pieces sit in the same app. the questions aren’t just about whether the AI can answer—they’re about whether community knowledge is now the default engine behind what you see next.
Meta Forum app Facebook Groups AI chatbot iPhone Ask tab Magic: The Gathering New Jersey AI overviews community content
So basically Facebook is making an AI to read my groups… cool cool.
I don’t get why they need another app. They already have Groups, just make it searchable? Now it’s an “Ask” tab like it’s gonna replace people posting info.
They’re saying it pulls from posts across groups but also “lets you tap references.” That’s just a fancy way of saying they’re scraping everything and showing it back. Also the Magic: The Gathering part feels random, like they’re testing it on nerd stuff first.
If it’s like Google AI overviews but from Facebook groups… so it’ll recommend me groups I didn’t join, right? That sounds like the opposite of privacy. And they act like it’s separate from normal Facebook but you log in with your same account so yeah, no thanks.