Meta isn’t exactly subtle about its “borrowing” of social media platform features to regain some of the younger crowd back to Facebook and Instagram. There have been Reels from TikTok and Snapchat, dual camera perspectives from BeReal, and now community chats from Discord and Reddit.
Yes, that’s right, Facebook is prompting communities. Facebook has always been relatively isolated. You added your friends and family and they saw your posts. If you posted to a Group, you posted only to the Group, whereas Twitter and Instagram more act like a bullhorn to the world.
Facebook’s most community focussed feature has undoubtedly been the Groups, which is now the focus of their latest feature. Like Discord, community chats bring Groups to Messenger, where rather than posting a bulletin for people to put their comments to, you can have a back and forth in a group chat.
As explained by Meta: “The experience seamlessly blends Messenger and Facebook Groups to allow people to connect when, where and how they want. Admins can now start a conversation about a topic and get in-the-moment responses instead of waiting for people to comment on a post. And, rather than navigating multiple topics in a single Messenger group chat, the person who creates the Community Chat can organize chats into categories so group members can easily find what’s most interesting to them.”
