Written by Julien Ricciarelli-Bonnal
2 August 2026
The Essentials
Facebook is multiplying its transformations in an attempt to become indispensable again as user behaviour fragments across TikTok, Reddit, messaging apps and online marketplaces. Full-screen video, algorithmic recommendations, AI-enhanced groups, an expanded Marketplace and dedicated applications now form an unusually broad strategy. This accumulation allows Meta to build on a network that remains vast, but it also raises a question that has become increasingly difficult to avoid: what remains of Facebook’s original identity when the feed from friends becomes only one experience among many? The platform does not lack features. It may now lack a clear reason for people to open it.
For years, Facebook did not need to explain what it was. The platform allowed people to reconnect with friends, follow their updates, share photographs and organise part of their social lives around a network that already existed. Its advantage did not depend on a spectacular format, but on the presence of people users actually knew.
That certainty has gradually disappeared. Private conversations moved towards messaging apps, short-form video towards TikTok and Instagram, specialised discussions towards Reddit, while Marketplace became one of the few areas where Facebook retained an immediately recognisable purpose. Meta did not abandon its original social network. It added layer after layer to respond to each shift in behaviour.
The latest announcements bring that strategy into sharper focus. Meta plans to test opening Facebook directly into full-screen video for a subset of users who already appear to prefer that format. At the same time, the company is developing dedicated tools for group members, administrators, creators and Marketplace sellers, many of them supported by artificial intelligence. Facebook is no longer merely defending its existing model. It is attempting to bring together, within one infrastructure, the behaviours that made its competitors successful.
Video Is Turning Facebook Into a Late Competitor to TikTok
Facebook did not suddenly discover video in 2026. The platform has hosted audiovisual content for years, and Meta gradually introduced Reels throughout its applications. The current shift concerns the hierarchy of uses: video is no longer simply content available on Facebook. For some users, it may become the entrance to Facebook itself.
The logic is not difficult to understand. Meta says that time spent watching video on Facebook grew at a double-digit rate year on year in the United States, while improvements to its ranking systems increased views of organic feed and video posts. Facebook is also surfacing substantially more Reels published on the same day, bringing its rhythm closer to platforms built around immediate discovery.
Demand therefore exists. The more difficult question is what room this form of consumption leaves for the historical social network. TikTok was designed around an algorithmic feed capable of entertaining users without knowing their friends. Facebook, by contrast, was built on a social graph accumulated over more than two decades. The more the application prioritises recommended content from strangers, the less visible the value of that inheritance becomes.
Meta has already acknowledged this tension. In 2025, it reintroduced a Friends tab focused on updates from personal connections rather than recommended content, presenting the move as an attempt to revive some of the original Facebook experience. The company was effectively rebuilding a protected space for the very relationship-based content that had once defined the entire platform.
That contradiction sits at the heart of Facebook’s current strategy. The company wants to resemble the platforms that now capture attention, while simultaneously restoring a corner of the application where users can escape the consequences of that transformation. Facebook is becoming more competitive as an entertainment product, but potentially less distinctive as a social one.
Groups Are Beginning to Resemble Reddit Enhanced by AI
Facebook’s second major strength lies in its groups. Many have become genuine local or specialist infrastructures, supporting neighbourhood exchanges, professional communities, travel advice, shared interests, commercial recommendations and discussions around highly specific problems. In these spaces, Facebook already looks less like a network of friends and more like an enormous collection of forums connected to personal identities.
Meta is now pushing that model further with Forum, a dedicated application for people who use Facebook Groups most actively. The app remains synchronised with existing groups, but introduces features such as Group Ask, designed to collect firsthand answers from members, and Admin AI, intended to support administrators. Artificial intelligence can also surface relevant older posts, turning years of accumulated discussion into a more accessible body of knowledge.
The comparison with Reddit becomes difficult to avoid. Both platforms allow users to enter interest-based communities, ask questions and receive answers from people they do not personally know. Facebook nevertheless retains an important distinction: its groups are often connected to identifiable profiles, local areas and existing social relationships, whereas Reddit is much more strongly built around pseudonymous participation.
That connection can increase trust, particularly in local groups where recommendations concern a tradesperson, a restaurant, an event or a practical problem. It can also make Facebook more useful than a conventional discussion forum because the conversation may lead directly to an offline action.
Yet the launch of a separate application for highly engaged group users also reveals a structural problem. The main Facebook experience has become too crowded to serve every behaviour equally well. Each dedicated product may improve a particular use case, but it also confirms that the central application is struggling to contain all the roles Meta expects it to perform.
Marketplace Remains One of Facebook’s Clearest Identities
Marketplace may now be the most immediately understandable part of Facebook. People open it to buy furniture, sell an appliance, find a vehicle or search for something available nearby. The purpose is practical, local and closely connected to the network of profiles already present on the platform.
Meta is strengthening that activity with features that bring Marketplace closer to both classified advertising platforms such as Leboncoin and more structured ecommerce services. Artificial intelligence can help create listings, suggest information, support conversations with potential buyers and provide greater context about sellers. Meta has also introduced Seller, a dedicated application with listing management, a unified inbox, inventory controls and performance data.
This development illustrates something Facebook can still do better than many competitors: connect a digital need with a real-world interaction. The user does not merely consume content. They search for an item, contact a nearby person, arrange a meeting and complete a transaction.
Marketplace therefore gives Facebook a form of usefulness that short-form video cannot provide. It turns the scale of the social network into a local commercial infrastructure. At the same time, creating a dedicated seller application again suggests that Facebook is becoming less a single product than a gateway into several specialised services.
Facebook Is Accumulating Uses While Diluting Its Promise
An established platform cannot simply preserve the habits of its earliest users. Facebook must respond to changing formats, devices and expectations. It would be unreasonable to criticise every feature inspired by TikTok, Reddit or online marketplaces, particularly when those changes reflect genuine user behaviour.
The problem emerges when accumulation takes the place of direction. A person can now open Facebook to watch recommended videos, follow friends, join a group, sell a table, consult AI-generated answers, discover local activity or use a specialised app connected to their account. Each use has a justification. Their combination does not automatically create a coherent identity.
Facebook is trying to manage that tension through personalisation. People who prefer video can receive more video. Those attached to friends have a dedicated tab. Active sellers and group members are receiving their own tools. The platform would no longer be defined by one shared experience, but by its ability to assemble a different version of itself for each user.
That model may increase engagement, but it gradually turns Facebook into an infrastructure rather than a clearly defined product. Meta still owns the accounts, relationships, communities, listings and behavioural histories. It can connect them and redistribute them according to individual preferences. What it finds harder to explain is what “going on Facebook” now means.
To build a durable platform without diluting its value proposition, it is not enough to reproduce features that succeed elsewhere. Every addition must reinforce an identifiable role within the overall experience. Functional richness becomes a weakness when users can no longer understand what deserves their attention.
Facebook Still Matters Because It Remains Connected to Real Life
Facebook nevertheless retains an advantage that no imitation should obscure. TikTok understands which content can hold attention. Reddit organises specialist conversations. Classified advertising platforms facilitate transactions. Facebook can connect all these activities with people, towns, families, associations and communities that also exist beyond the screen.
Its identity may therefore depend less on a particular format than on this connection with real life. Local groups, events, Marketplace, old relationships and recommendations from identifiable people form a combination that no single competitor reproduces exactly.
Meta’s own recent product direction points towards this possibility. Its search and AI tools are being presented as ways to use opinions, experiences and conversations already shared across Facebook, while new local and community functions attempt to connect discovery with actions users can take in their everyday lives.
The answer to Facebook’s identity problem is therefore unlikely to be either a complete return to the old friends feed or an increasingly faithful copy of newer platforms. It lies in organising what Facebook already possesses: a vast network connecting digital behaviour with relationships, places and practical activity.
Facebook can become partly TikTok, partly Reddit and partly Leboncoin without necessarily ceasing to exist as Facebook. But Meta still has to prove that these borrowings strengthen one common promise rather than merely fill an application that no longer knows how to choose.
After more than twenty years, Facebook’s central difficulty is no longer deciding what it is capable of adding. It is deciding what it still wants to represent.
👉 A brand can expand its uses without losing what makes it recognisable. Ricciarelli Partners helps companies clarify their positioning and structure their transformation.
Written by Julien Ricciarelli-Bonnal
2 August 2026
