Meta built a Reddit rival out of Facebook Groups

By Paulo Vargas Published May 22, 2026

Meta has quietly launched Forum, a Facebook Groups app that pulls community answers into a cleaner standalone space.

The app gives Groups a new home for discussions, recommendations, and replies that would normally sit inside Facebook. For anyone who has searched through years of group posts for a useful answer, Forum looks like Meta’s attempt to make that knowledge easier to reach without sending people back into the main feed.

Forum is listed on the App Store as a free iPhone app from Meta. It’s still unclear how widely the test is available beyond the U.S. listing and iPhone users.

Forum puts questions and community advice at the center of the experience. Users can search across group conversations, while posts and recommendations are organized around shared interests instead of a broader social feed.

The Reddit comparison comes from that structure. Forum is built around the kind of niche discussions, recommendations, and back-and-forth answers that already make Facebook Groups valuable, only now they sit inside a dedicated product.

AI is a major part of that setup. There’s an Ask beta that can pull answers from group conversations, summarize interests, surface relevant discussions, and help admins manage communities.

The tradeoff is trust, as Facebook Groups work because people bring lived experience, personal context, and niche expertise. If AI turns that into bland summaries, Forum loses the human texture it’s trying to organize.

Forum still depends on the parent network. The App Store listing identifies it as a Facebook app. Users sign in with an existing Facebook account, with profile details and activity carrying over.

That connection gives Meta a big head start. Forum can draw from years of group conversations, local recommendations, hobby communities, and support-style posts rather than waiting for users to rebuild those spaces from scratch.

It also limits the reset. Anyone hoping for a clean break from Facebook’s identity system and social graph probably won’t find it here.

Forum is still early. Meta is calling it a public test, and the App Store listing notes that some features may vary by country or region.

The bigger signal is where Meta sees value. Groups already hold searchable advice, local tips, hobby knowledge, and support threads, and Forum gives that material a dedicated product with AI built into discovery.

For now, treat Forum as an experiment rather than a full Reddit replacement. The next things to watch are Android availability, a wider rollout, and whether Meta can make AI speed up group search without muting the people behind the answers.