Your mobile Facebook feed is about to look different, but will anyone care?
Facebook is launching a new Feeds tab and is renaming its home page to Home on the app.
The Feeds tab will allow users to curate a Favorites list of friends and Pages they care about and filter out content they don't care about — like, say, Suggested For You posts. Home is simply the new name of the home tab where you can discover Reels and Stories. The whole point of the move is to give users "more options" for seeing and sorting their content, according to the press release.
"There are times you might know just what you’re looking for — say, the latest posts from your groups — or you may want to encounter fresh, entertaining content," the press release explains. "As Home becomes more of a discovery engine for you to find and follow new content and creators through recommendations, the Feeds tab provides an easy way to access the content from the people and communities you’re already connected with on Facebook."
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Some users will have access to Feeds through the shortcut bar today, and the rest of the updates will be rolled out over the next week. If you want to take a look, update your app.
This comes four months after Instagram, another Meta-owned company, made a similar change by introducing two new feed options, Favorites and Following. Favorites shows users the latest posts from a list of accounts they choose, similar to Facebook's new Favorites list. Following shows users posts only from people they follow, whereas the home feed is full of suggested posts and ads.
It's unlikely that a change in feed and presentation is going to draw more people to the platform, which has faced a mass exodus of users in recent years, and for good reason. But folks have been complaining for some time about not being able to set defaults on social media apps — so we'll take what we can get, I guess.
UPDATE: July 21, 2022, 4:37 p.m. EST Update: A previous version of this story stated that the Feeds and Home tab were announced on desktop in March 2021. The March 2021 announcement was for the Feed Filter Bar, a different feature that the Feeds tab is replacing.
Topics Facebook
Christianna Silva is a senior culture reporter covering social platforms and the creator economy, with a focus on the intersection of social media, politics, and the economic systems that govern us. Since joining Mashable in 2021, they have reported extensively on meme creators, content moderation, and the nature of online creation under capitalism.
Before joining Mashable, they worked as an editor at NPR and MTV News, a reporter at Teen Vogue and VICE News, and as a stablehand at a mini-horse farm. You can follow her on Bluesky @christiannaj.bsky.social and Instagram @christianna_j.
