Facebook groups are about to make big changes, and if you’ve used Discord, the new approach should look pretty familiar. Meta is testing a new left-aligned sidebar and channel list for Groups, and the changes are giving me some serious Discord vibes. Meta even evokes Discord with a purple accent color.
In the center of the changes is a new sidebar that lists your groups with rounded square icons. As with Discord and Slack, you can set groups to appear in the list first. Individual groups will have a new menu that looks straight out of Discord. The menu organizes things like channels, Messenger conversations, and events one after the other.
Stop me if you’ve seen something like this before. Image: Meta
Groups channels can be text chats, audio rooms, or feed rooms where people can post and comment in a way similar to what you’re used to seeing in your own feed. Text chat looks like a Messenger thread, while the audio rooms are very similar to the audio rooms in Discord.
You can take a look at all three channels in this Meta screenshot gallery, which by chance includes a hypothetical group dedicated to video games. I wonder why that might be.
Grid view
The test comes when Meta begins his turn to make Facebook feel more like TikTok. The purpose of this change is for your feed to recommend more content from accounts that you don’t follow, so it makes sense for Meta to use the change as an opportunity to rethink how Facebook groups work. But we’ll have to wait and see if the combination of TikTok and Discord on Facebook makes sense in practice; personally I think it could be confusing.
The changes will be publicly available in the coming months, Meta spokeswoman Kate Cichy told The Verge.