Facebook’s Home tab goes full TikTok, while Feeds is just for those your follow
Image Credit: Meta
Facebook ditch the News Feed and introduce two new viewing options: Home and Feeds. Choose how many suggested posts you see on Facebook.
Announced by Mark Zuckerberg in a recent post, Facebook are introducing two new feeds.
Home, replacing the News Feed, will be the page you see when opening the app on mobile. Users are presented with a familiar personalized feed of recommended content, Stories and Reels. Stepping up their AI and machine learning, Facebook hope more suggested posts than ever will help claw back some of TikTok’s market.
The brand new Feeds tab brings Facebook back to its roots. You’ll see five options at the top of the screen, letting you filter the results by All, Favorites, Friends, Groups and Pages. Posts are sorted chronologically and free from any suggested posts.
These changes are a welcome addition and are similar to the recent addition from Instagram made earlier this year, that allows you to switch between Home, Following and Favorites, the latter two with chronological feeds of content from those you care about. In the algorithm-driven, new norm for social media platforms, it’s nice to see a feed of posts from those I choose to follow, rather than what the platform thinks I want to see. Note, there are still a significant number of sponsored posts in these feeds. Personally I’m seeing an ad roughly every third post.
It’s a shame Facebook and Instagram don’t lean into these new viewing options further, by showing Stories at the top from friends (when in Feeds or Following on Facebook or Instagram), or a way to set one view option as the default, so the next time you open the app, you are taken there automatically.
The update is currently rolling out globally. You’ll find Home and Feeds in the shortcut bar on the bottom of the iOS app and top of the Android app. The shortcut bar changes based on what pages you use the most. You can tap and hold any icon to pin or hide, except Home.
