Meta’s new Forum app for iPhones takes Facebook Groups and moves them to a dedicated app with a dedicated AI chatbot to go with it, like an AI revamp of the ill-fated Groups app Facebook shut down in 2017.
Rather than going to ChatGPT or tacking “Reddit” onto the end of a Google search, Forum users can view, search for, and post advice directly in their Facebook groups, with optional help from Meta’s AI.
After logging in with my Facebook account, Forum automatically pulled in the groups I was part of on Facebook and populated my feed with posts from those groups, along with suggestions from groups I’m not part of, similar to my Reddit feed, although without Reddit’s pseudonymity.
Groups aren’t front-and-center in Facebook, so I wasn’t surprised to find some on my list that I had completely forgotten about. Aside from the feed, you can also view a mini version of your Facebook profile that just shows your group posts, browse new groups, and post directly to specific groups.
Forum’s AI chatbot lives under the “Ask” tab, where you can get AI-generated responses pulling from posts to various Facebook groups, similar to the way Google’s search results and AI overviews pull from the Reddit content it licenses and other sources on the internet.
To try it out, I asked the AI a few questions about Magic: The Gathering. Meta’s chatbot referenced posts from a couple of Magic groups I’m in and gave generally sound advice, with suggestions for groups in my area of New Jersey. The results included the posts the AI references, so you can tap them to view the full conversation around those posts.
Meta communications manager Feryal Hemamda confirmed Forum’s 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.”