Facebook is killing Community Chats in groups, with deletion following a read-only phase

Facebook is removing Community Chats, the messaging feature linked to Facebook Groups, and group admins began receiving pop-up notifications before any broad public announcement from Meta.

The notice tells admins the feature is going away and points members back to the group itself. Reported deprecation dates vary: some admins see August 22, others August 29. The staged shutdown runs as follows: from August 16 no new community chats can be started; from August 22 existing chats become read-only with no new messages; afterward, chats linked to groups are permanently deleted. Messages can be downloaded in advance through the Accounts Center.

Facebook Groups themselves are unaffected, and the company is steering communities toward Messenger Communities, chat-based groups for up to 5,000 members created inside the Messenger app. Admins who rely on the feature for niche member conversations are weighing alternatives including Telegram, Discord, Slack and WhatsApp.

The quiet, notification-only rollout has frustrated group admins, who note that features their communities depend on can vanish with little warning and no formal announcement, a recurring pattern in Meta's product management.

In other platform news, Meta published tips for optimizing ads with its AI tools, and Instagram's head confirmed that videos edited in the platform's standalone Edits app get a reach boost, a nudge creators suspected from the moment the app launched.