Facebook groups are about to go through some big changes, and if you’ve been using Discord, the new approach should look pretty familiar. Meta is testing a new left-aligned sidebar and channel list for groups, and the changes are giving me some serious Discord vibes. Meta even summons Discord with a purple accent color.

Central to the changes is a new sidebar that displays your groups with rounded square icons. As with Discord and Slack, you can pin groups so that they appear first on the list. Individual groups have a new menu that appears to have been lifted directly from Discord. The menu organizes things like channels, Messenger conversations, and events sequentially.

Image: Meta

Channels in Groups can be text chats, audio rooms, or feedrooms where people can post and comment in a way similar to what you’re used to in your own feed. Text chat is similar to a Messenger thread, while audio rooms are a lot like audio rooms in Discord.

You can check out all three of those channels in this gallery of screenshots from Meta, which happens to feature a hypothetical group dedicated to video games. I wonder why that could be.

Grid view

The test arrives when Meta starts his shift to make Facebook feel more like TikTok. The purpose of that change is for your feed to recommend more content from accounts you don’t follow, so it makes sense for Meta to use the shift as an opportunity to rethink how Facebook groups work. But we’ll have to wait and see if the mixing of TikTok and Discord in Facebook makes sense in practice – personally I think it can be confusing.

The changes will be publicly available in the coming months, Meta spokesperson Kate Cichy . tells us The edge†