Meta has released Forum, a new iPhone app that pulls Facebook Groups out of the main Facebook experience and puts them into a dedicated product with built-in AI search. The app also gives users a way to browse group advice, post directly into groups and search conversations with help from Meta’s chatbot.
Once a user logs in with a Facebook account, Forum automatically loads the groups that person already belongs to, fills a feed with posts from those groups and adds suggestions from groups they are not part of yet. The app also includes a mini version of the user’s Facebook profile that shows only group posts, along with a separate Ask tab where the chatbot can generate responses by pulling from posts across multiple groups.
The launch matters because Facebook shut down its ill-fated Groups app in 2017, and Forum is being presented as a revival of that idea with an AI layer added on top. In practice, that means Meta is trying to make groups easier to search and more useful at a time when people increasingly expect answers to come back in the style of a search engine instead of a long scroll through old threads.
The chatbot already appears to be doing that work. In testing, it referenced posts from a couple of Magic groups the author belonged to and surfaced suggestions for groups in the author’s area of New Jersey. The results also included the posts the AI relied on, and users can tap those items to open the full conversation around them.
Meta communications manager Feryal Hemamda confirmed the launch in a statement, saying the company tests new products publicly to see what people find interesting and useful across its apps. That fits Forum’s design, which blends a familiar Groups feed with AI-generated search results in a way that resembles Google search results and AI Overviews that pull from Reddit and other sources.
The tension in Forum’s debut is that Meta is reviving a product it once abandoned, but this time it is trying to make it feel indispensable by using AI to organize the very conversations that made groups valuable in the first place. Whether users want a separate app for that job is the question the launch leaves hanging.
