From Social Feed to Video-First: What Facebook Is Actually Changing
Facebook’s new video-first home screen is a full-screen mobile interface that launches users directly into an immersive video player instead of the traditional scrolling feed, turning the app into a short-form video platform where discovery begins with autoplay clips rather than posts from friends or Pages and reshaping how people encounter content, creators, and commerce the moment they open Facebook. This is not a cosmetic tweak; it is a statement of intent. Facebook will test opening the app straight into full-screen video for a subset of mobile users later this year, while keeping the classic feed available as a second tab and allowing participants to opt out. In practice, the app home screen changes push video to the front of the experience and demote the legacy feed to a supporting role. Facebook is saying, plainly, that the future of its app is built around watching, not scrolling.
Why Meta Is Willing to Rebuild Facebook Around Short-Form Video
The Facebook video redesign is driven by money and momentum. Meta’s short-form video business has already grown to a USD 50 billion (approx. RM230 billion) annual run rate, a figure large enough to justify rearchitecting the app around clips. When Tom Alison, Head of Facebook, says “people are showing us they want more immersive, visual, video-forward experiences” and that video is where conversations, communities and commerce are forming, he is describing usage patterns that now match Meta’s revenue priorities. The company has been quietly preparing this shift: last year Facebook unified Reels, longer videos and Live into a single full-screen video player and revamped recommendations, a clear precursor to today’s decision. Turning the home screen into a continuous video surface strengthens Meta’s pitch to advertisers who already treat short-form video platforms as essential and makes Facebook feel less like an aging social network and more like a modern entertainment app.
How Ordinary Users Will Experience the New Facebook
For regular users, the impact is simple and significant: if you are in the test, opening Facebook means opening straight into full-screen video, not your familiar feed. Your first interaction becomes swiping through clips, following recommendation cues rather than checking what friends posted overnight. To Meta’s credit, the company is keeping an escape hatch; users in the experiment can opt out and return to a feed-first version of the app, and the classic feed remains available as a second tab. Still, default behavior matters. When the path of least resistance is watching video, conversations and community interactions migrate to comments and DMs attached to clips. Even Marketplace and shopping are being pulled into this gravity well: one in three young adults use Marketplace daily, and there are 430 million items plus 44 million vehicles listed each month globally, a huge surface that Meta now imagines framed by video-first discovery.
What This Means for Creators, Artists, and Power Users
For creators and artists, this test is a warning shot: treat Facebook as a short-form video platform, or risk being buried. If the video-first home screen expands, it will influence where audiences encounter content when they first open the app, which in turn changes what formats perform and what promotional strategies make sense. Static posts and link drops will be competing against autoplay clips that occupy the entire screen. The company is already building infrastructure around this world. A revived Creator Studio app guides creators on what to post next, while a dedicated Seller app for high-volume Marketplace sellers layers AI-written listing descriptions, price suggestions and tags into a streamlined workflow. Power users get better tools, but the clear message is that Facebook wants them producing video-centric, commerce-friendly content. For artists and labels, this should prompt a re-think of release campaigns: thumb-stopping clips are now the front door, not an optional extra.
A Test, Not Yet a Takeover—but the Direction Is Clear
Meta is keen to stress that this is a limited experiment, not an immediate, irreversible overhaul. The video-first experience will roll out later this year in markets with heavy video usage, with another test planned for the U.S. next year, and users can switch back to the conventional feed at any time. Whether it becomes the default depends on performance. Yet the direction of travel is obvious: twenty years into Facebook’s life, the company is willing to reshape its core app around video and recommendation-driven discovery rather than social graphs and text-heavy feeds. For users, the choice is between adapting to a more entertainment-driven Facebook or retreating to the secondary tab. For creators and marketers, the choice is more stark: embrace feed-agnostic, short-form clips designed for a full-screen mobile interface, or watch the audience’s attention slide toward those who do. Facebook’s identity crisis is ending; it wants to be a video app, and this test is how it finds out if users agree.
