Over the past few years, Meta has been working to transform Facebook’s main feed into a “discovery engine” that primarily shows recommended content from pages, groups, and accounts that users don’t already follow. But while the company said this change was necessary to compete with TikTok, it also disappointed Facebook users who lost the ability to see posts from people they actually know.
Now, Meta is trying to fix this with an updated Friends section in the app that will only show posts and content related to your Facebook friends. The company claims that this update is the first of many designed to bring back “OG” features to the 21-year-old social network.
With the update, the Friends tab in the Facebook app, which was previously only for friend requests, will now be home to a feed consisting solely of content related to your friends. This includes the Stories feed and posts, as well as videos, birthdays, friend requests, and “suggestions from people you might know.”
Although Meta is positioning this change as part of a larger effort to make Facebook more “social,” this is not the first time the company has offered separate feeds for “friends only” content. In fact, Mark Zuckerberg showed off a dedicated “friends” feed in 2022 amid the company’s push to add more recommendations to users’ “home” feeds. This feed, which shows posts from friends in reverse chronological order, is still available, although it is somewhat hidden in the app.
It’s unclear what else Meta has in store for other “old” Facebook features that could play on nostalgia for the 21-year-old social network. (Facebook’s once-infamous “poke” feature already had a brief revival last year.) But for Zuckerberg, this is clearly a priority.
“I actually think there’s a whole opportunity that I think will be very interesting to realize, which is to create, one by one, a bunch of things that used to be a joyful experience that people had when they were part of Facebook that just don’t exist on the Internet today,” Zuckerberg said in a podcast dedicated to these changes.
