The group's the thing!

We reworked quite a few things (a lot of them behind the scenes) to make Friends Without Ads more focused on groups. We even went to the extreme of taking away the global feed and global posts. Why would we do such a thing? Well, no one wanted them! The overwhelming majority of usage, feature requests, and bug reports were all centered around groups. Even more interesting, most of the post that our friends made on the global feed? Well, they were actually mis-posts that were actually intended for a group! So, we're making things simpler and more powerful at the same time by focusing everything on groups. Read on to find out all the bits that have changed:

Your feed is now your Home

The old friend feed is gone, and in its place is Home: one scrollable view of everything happening across all of your groups. Posting works just like before, except the composer now requires a group (and remembers your last pick, so most of the time you just type and hit Post like always).

In case you still want them, your global posts are still there.

Every post you ever made to the global feed now lives in a brand-new private group called "'s Posts." You own it, and the people who were your friends are already members. Same posts, same photos, same replies and reactions... just with a proper home now. Want a new friend to see your posts? Invite them to your group. Which brings us to...

Friends and Groups now have different jobs

Friendship is how you find people, message them, and see their profiles. Groups are how you share posts. Adding a friend no longer automatically shows them your posts. Instead, you decide which groups (and therefore which posts) each person belongs in. Your notifications and digests follow the same rule: you'll hear about posts in your groups, plus replies to your own posts. We think this matches how you were already thinking about it anyway.

Introducing Group Sponsors

Your groups are yours to manage and support. This includes the quota. Instead of every poster being responsible for their own quota, now the sponsor of the group is responsible for the quota. In the future, this will mean there will be different ways for folks to chip in and support their group. For now, it's just something to be aware of for quota management purposes. We anticipate that means you will let your group know whether or not you want your members to be posting large files or not based on how you want to use the group. It also means if you're on someone else's group and they ask everyone to upload an intro video, well, good news, that's not coming out of your quota anymore! If a group with multiple owners/admins has its sponsor step away, photo posting pauses until someone new sponsors it (text keeps working - words are free, pixels are not). As always with storage: please be kind.

Some Miscellaneous tweaks and updates.

Remember when we freed your GIFs? Turns out they were still imprisoned in group posts. 😟 Previously, animated GIFs posted to a group came out as boring still images. That's fixed. Your GIFs are now free to move about everywhere.

Also: your Groups page now sorts by which groups you visited most recently, because that list was about to get a lot more important.