Facebook rolled out a revamped Friends tab feature aimed at reconnecting users with content from people they actually know, marking a strategic return to the platform's founding social mission. The new feature, now being rolled out in the United States and Canada, creates a dedicated newsfeed of only friends' content without algorithmic recommendations.
The revamped Friends tab will display friends' stories, reels, posts, birthdays, and friend requests. The tab used to mostly hold friend requests and "People You May Know" suggestions, but has since transformed into a thoughtfully curated feed that displays only content from confirmed relationships.
The change, as per Facebook's announcement, is the first of a series of several "OG" (original) Facebook experiences to be rolled out throughout the year. The company acknowledged that as Facebook has expanded to include such things as Groups, Video, and Marketplace, "the magic of friends has fallen away" in the process.
The new Friends tab will be accessible to the users either from the home feed's navigation bar or from the Bookmarks. For easy access, users can also pin the tab by clicking their profile photo, navigating to "Settings & Privacy," then "Settings," then "Tab bar," and there personalize and pin the Friends tab. Meta writes:
We want to make it easier for people to find their friends’ content on Facebook. So starting today in the United States and Canada, the new Friends tab provides an experience made up entirely of content from your Facebook friends.
Formerly a place to view friend requests and People You May Know, the Friends tab will now show your friends’ stories, reels, posts, birthdays and friend requests.
Instagram is also bringing back a variation of its former "Activity" feed, which was discontinued in 2019, with Adam Mosseri announcing a new Reels tab that will display videos that friends have liked or commented on, allowing users to see which connections have engaged with specific Reels.
This shift appears to be part of CEO Mark Zuckerberg's general strategy for revisiting some of the platform's former popularity, where social relationships and not algorithmic-matched content were driving the user experience.
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