Chronological Feeds Set to Return to Facebook Soon

Like most social media platforms, Facebook currently displays stories through personalised feeds. However, that is about to change. In a Facebook post, Meta’s boss, Mark Zuckerberg, recently announced that they are planning to bring back the chronological feeds to the social media platform. Here is the announcement:

“One of the most requested features for Facebook is to make sure people don’t miss friends’ posts. So today we’re launching a Feeds tab where you can see posts from your friends, groups, Pages and more separately in chronological order. The app will still open to a personalised feed on the Home tab, where our discovery engine will recommend the content we think you’ll care most about. But the Feeds tab will give you a way to customise and control your experience further.”

Facebook replaced the chronological feeds more than a decade ago with the current personalised feeds. Bringing back chronological feeds does not mean that the personalised feeds will be removed. Instead, the home page will have the normal (personalised) feed that users can access when they open the app. The home page will have two tabs: “Reels”, a TikTok-like feed and ‘Stories’, a short video feature like that of Snapchat. The other tab will be the new ‘Feeds’ feature that users can select if they want to see the chronological feeds.

Facebook currently uses an algorithm to sort and determine the posts to display. Basically, it displays the posts that it thinks you like, according to the pages you like, your friends, and Facebook groups you are in, among others. As much as this is great for discovering new content, it comes at the expense of missing out on your friends’ posts. 

While there is a way to make Facebook display chronological feeds, through settings, the system returns to default when you exit the app. It means that you will have to go to settings every time you exit and open the app.

Many people have accused Facebook of forcing them to see posts they are not interested in seeing. The planned changes on Facebook feeds aim to bring back users, amid stiff competition from other social media sites like Tik Tok.