Facebook fixes the Friends tab to stop showing recommended garbage
Meta has rolled out an updated Friends tab in the mobile app for iOS and Android, hoping to restore some of the magic of the original Facebook.
Facebook started as a service to connect with friends and family. In the early days, there were no celebrities, brands, companies and pages spamming your feed, just content from the people you know and love. Over time, Facebook morphed into something completely different, and now Meta is attempting to bring back some of the magic of the original Facebook.
This includes adding a Friends tab to the latest version of the app, where you can browse content “just from your Facebook friends, no recommended content,” according to Meta’s announcement. Update your installed copy of the Facebook app via the App Store to get this tab. You may need to force-quit the app and reopen it for the changes to take effect.
Facebook’s Friends tab is now much more useful
You can access the Friends via the navigation bar on your home feed and in the Bookmarks section. Instead of showing friend requests and suggested people, the Friends tab now displays your friends’ stories, reels, posts, birthdays and friend requests, all in one place.
To pin the Friends section to the tab area so it’s always available from there, open the in-app settings interface, select “Tab bar” and choose to customize the bar, then click “Friends” and pin the tab.
Meta frames this change as the first step toward “bringing back the joy of what we first created on Facebook,” with more changes to come later this year.
Connecting with friends has been a part of Facebook since it launched. Over the years, Facebook evolved to meet changing needs and created best-in-class experiences across Groups, Video, Marketplace and more, but the magic of friends has fallen away. We’ll be adding several “OG” Facebook experiences throughout the year, beginning with the revamped Friends tab.
“This idea of having a central place of what’s going on with your friends, that was like the magic of the early days of social media,” the Facebook app head Tom Alison told The New York Times. “We’re making sure that there’s still a place for this stuff on Facebook. It is something that shouldn’t get lost in the modern social media mix.”
The new friends tab is currently available in the United States and Canada. I’m located in Europe, but I got it anyway by installing a VPN on my iPhone. You can update your installed copy of the app to the latest version via the Facebook page on the App Store. If you still use Facebook, be sure to check out our tips to secure your Facebook account and prevent unauthorized use.
Source link: https://www.idownloadblog.com/2025/03/27/facebook-friends-tab-announcement/
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