Facebook today announced a pretty substantial change to its app. First off, the main feed you see when you open the app is now called Home, which makes sense and is way overdue. But that’s not the big news.
The big news is that there is now an extra tab in the app called Feeds. And this tab is sorted in reverse chronological order – you know, like what is now called Home was before the algorithm took over.
The Feeds tab has a few filters of its own – you can let it show you everything or just stuff from your friends, groups, Pages or Favorites – this is a curated list of the friends and Pages you care about most.
As for the Home feed, Facebook is now positioning it as “more of a discovery engine for you to find and follow new content and creators through recommendations”. The counterbalance to that is Feeds, where you “get access to content from the people and communities you’re already connected to.” There are no “Suggested for you” posts in feeds.
The new Home and Feeds tabs are rolling out today to a small subset of Facebook users on both iOS and Android. Everyone on Facebook should receive them within the next week.
Note that the shortcut bar with these tabs is at the bottom of the Facebook app on iOS and at the top on Android. The tabs in the shortcut bar will change based on the parts of the app you use most, but you can personalize and pin tabs in your shortcut bar, making their placement permanent if you want.