Facebook’s latest overhaul makes one thing brutally clear: if users want TikTok, Facebook is now willing to become TikTok. The company is about to test a new, video-first experience that drops people into full-screen clips the second they open the app — a sharp break from the feed of friends, family posts, and groups that defined the platform for almost two decades.
Facebook’s TikTok-style reboot, explained
Facebook head Tom Alison says the company will start testing what he calls a “reimagined experience” later this year. For a subset of users, opening Facebook will no longer mean seeing a traditional news feed. Instead, they’ll be dropped straight into a full-screen video interface that looks, sounds, and behaves a lot like the TikTok-style experience that has eaten the internet.
Meta hasn’t shown screenshots or demos of the new interface yet. What it has said is that the tests will begin in countries where people already lean heavily toward video content, with a potential rollout to US users sometime next year. Translation: this isn’t a small A/B test buried in settings. Facebook is flirting with changing the entire front door of the app.
The internal logic is simple. Meta’s data tells it that “video is where conversations are happening, communities are forming, and even commerce is starting to take place.” That’s the holy trinity for Facebook: engagement, groups, and shopping. If those are now happening primarily in video, the thinking goes, Facebook’s home screen has to revolve around video too.
Why Meta is chasing TikTok now
For years, Facebook could shrug off rivals because everybody was already on Facebook. That defensive moat is shrinking. Meta doesn’t break out separate user counts for Facebook, Instagram, and its other apps, but the company’s own numbers show it collectively lost 20 million users in the first quarter of 2026. For a company that lives and dies on growth curves, that’s a blaring alarm.
Facebook is still described as the most popular social platform globally, but the gap is tightening. YouTube is close behind, and TikTok — the app that turned the vertical video feed into a default way of using the internet — blew past 1 billion monthly users just three years after launch, far faster than Facebook managed in its early days.
Meta already tried to copy TikTok once by rolling out Reels on Instagram in 2020. Now it’s running the same play on its original social network, the one that once defined the idea of a news feed. The pivot stings a little more when you remember that in 2022, Alison insisted he saw “TikTok chasing Facebook,” not the other way around. Four years later, Facebook is redesigning itself around the TikTok playbook anyway.
From friends to feeds to full-screen video
This new TikTok-style interface marks another step in a long evolution. Facebook started as a friends-and-family network, then became a machine for news, memes, and viral content. Later, it tried to rebadge itself as a groups-and-community hub. Now it’s effectively making video the home page.
It’s not just about swapping one layout for another. Putting full-screen video front and center means changing which content gets rewarded. Short clips from creators, brands, and influencers are likely to be elevated even more, while traditional status updates, photo albums, and text-heavy posts risk being buried deeper inside the app.
There’s also a quiet but important shift in how Facebook frames “community.” If “where conversations are happening” increasingly means reacting to and commenting on video clips, then the future of Facebook looks less like a web of interpersonal relationships and more like an entertainment platform with a comments section attached.
Meanwhile, Facebook is also becoming Reddit and Craigslist
The TikTok imitation is only part of the story. While Facebook retools its main experience around video, Meta is also quietly carving out standalone apps that mimic other parts of the social web.
First, there’s Seller, a dedicated app designed for Marketplace power users. It functions as a Craigslist-style control center, giving sellers a place to track their performance, manage listings, and message buyers without wading through the clutter of the main Facebook app.
Earlier this year, Facebook also launched Forum, an app that pulls the sprawling world of Facebook Groups into its own dedicated space. The pitch sounds very close to Reddit’s core idea: topic-centric communities where people gather around shared interests instead of personal connections.
Put it all together and you get a picture of Meta disassembling the original Facebook into specialized tools — TikTok for video, Craigslist-style Seller for commerce, Reddit-like Forum for communities — while still trying to keep users in the same ecosystem.
The cost of chasing everyone else
If you’re a longtime Facebook user, these shifts may feel less like innovation and more like an identity crisis. The company is trying to be TikTok for entertainment, Reddit for groups, and Craigslist for selling stuff, all while carrying the baggage of being the world’s default social network.
There are obvious upsides for Meta. A video-first Facebook could keep younger users from bleeding out to rivals. A Seller app aimed at serious Marketplace users might help Meta squeeze more value out of local commerce. A Reddit-style Forum app could shore up the Groups feature, which has quietly been one of Facebook’s stickiest products.
But there are trade-offs. Every time Facebook copies someone else’s format, it risks diluting what made the platform distinctive in the first place. The original promise — log in, see what the people you know are doing — becomes harder to find under layers of algorithmic recommendation, video feeds, and sidecar apps.
There’s also the fatigue factor. Users have spent years watching their feeds morph with every strategic pivot: news-heavy, then video, then groups, then “meaningful interactions,” then Reels, now full-screen clips on launch. Constant reinvention may help Meta chase the next growth curve, but it also makes Facebook feel unstable, like the ground is always shifting under your thumbs.
Free verification, with a catch
Alongside all the product experiments, Meta is also reworking one of the most politically charged pieces of modern social platforms: verification.
Facebook already sells verification through Meta Verified, a subscription that starts at $11.99 per month. Now the company says it will also offer a free verified badge, unlocked if users complete a “simple selfie verification” process. The stated goal is to make it easier to tell that a profile is linked to an actual person.
That’s a notable shift at a time when identity, bots, and impersonation are hot-button issues across social media. In theory, free verification could improve trust: if you see a checkmark, you know there’s a real human behind the account, even if they’re not paying for perks.
But building verification around facial selfies raises questions Facebook hasn’t fully answered in public. Where are those selfie scans stored? How long are they kept? How are they secured? And how will this “real person” signal be blended into the ranking systems that already decide which posts you actually see?
What users should expect
For now, most Facebook users won’t notice anything right away. The full-screen video tests are limited to select countries and a subset of people within them. The US may not see the new interface until next year, and it could still change along the way.
The Seller app, on the other hand, is launching now for Marketplace sellers, and the Forum app is already live for people who practically live in Groups. The free verification rollout will depend on how quickly Meta can scale its selfie system and how aggressively it decides to promote the new badges.
What’s clear is that Facebook’s center of gravity is moving away from the familiar blue feed and toward separate experiences: one for creators and full-screen video, one for power sellers, one for interest-based communities, all stitched together by Meta’s underlying identity and ad infrastructure.
What This Means
Facebook’s decision to test a TikTok-style full-screen video home screen is about more than aesthetics. It’s a recognition that the old formula — a chronological (or semi-chronological) feed built around your social graph — no longer guarantees growth in a world of algorithmic entertainment apps.
If Meta succeeds, Facebook could evolve into a hybrid: part TikTok-style video network, part Reddit-like community hub, part Craigslist-style marketplace, with a verification system that nudges more people to prove they’re real. For creators and sellers, that might make Facebook more useful than it’s been in years.
If it fails, the risk is that Facebook becomes a blur of copied ideas: a place that looks like everywhere else on the internet, without a clear reason to open it first. In 2026, chasing TikTok might be necessary. The real question is whether Facebook can do that without losing the last pieces of what made it Facebook at all.
Photo: LPS.1 / CC0 via Wikimedia Commons | Photo: Facebook / Public domain via Wikimedia Commons
