Facebook groups appear to be getting an overhaul, possibly inspired by apps popular with younger audiences like Discord.
On Tuesday, announced meta that it’s testing Facebook groups and adding new features that improve many of its current capabilities. These new experimental group UI changes include a new sidebar and in-group menu.
The sidebar provides access to your favorite groups and small updates on their recent activity. The sidebar also provides options for pinning your favorite groups, creating groups, and finding new groups.
The other UI change is the presence of a new in-group menu. According to Meta, this menu will “contain events, shops, and a variety of channels to make it easier to connect with others around the topics that matter to you.”

Meta is also introducing a new feature for Facebook groups: channels. These channels are expected to provide smaller spaces for people to connect within their groups. And there will be three types of them: community chat channels, community audio channels, and community feed channels.

Chat channels are for text chat discussions. Audio channels are for audio calls (but one of the screenshots indicates cameras may be on during these calls). And feed channels seem to create smaller feeds within a group, where each feed revolves around a specific topic.

If these changes sound familiar to you. You are not the only one. As The Edge remarked, these changes most closely resemble another popular social media platform, Discord. It is no coincidence that the product photos offered by Meta contained a gaming theme group.
Not to mention that Meta has done the same thing with TikTok: adding new features to its own platform that are similar to the successful features of other apps.
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