Facebook adds Explore Feed under More menu in app, as it keeps testing a second customized feed from sources people haven't followed yet
Context & Ripple Effects
This is the third beat in Facebook's year-long experiment with a second feed. In April it began testing a second News Feed marked with a rocket ship icon, filled with posts from sources users haven't liked; by July the test had earned a permanent-ish home under the app's More menu rather than prime real estate at launch. The move extends a pattern going back to 2015, when Facebook tested multiple topic-based feeds in place of one main News Feed.
What changed with this update is placement: Explore Feed went from an icon-level experiment to a menu item every mobile user can find, signaling Facebook considered the concept worth scaling. Three months later it did exactly that, officially rolling out the discovery-focused Explore Feed on desktop and mobile.
First-order effects
- Mobile users now have a persistent, discoverable entry point to content from sources they don't follow, moving the second feed out of test-only visibility.
- Publishers and Pages gain a potential reach channel beyond their existing follower base, since the feed surfaces unfollowed sources algorithmically.
Second-order effects
- Burying the feed under More lets Facebook measure engagement without cannibalizing the main News Feed's attention — if usage holds, the October rollout becomes the natural next step, which is what happened.
- A dedicated discovery surface gives Facebook another slot to tune ranking and eventually monetize separately, deepening its grip on the social ad market where it already captures the dominant share alongside Instagram, YouTube and TikTok per Omdia.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds — 2015's topic feeds, 2017's rocket-ship test, 2021's tap-to-explore topics under posts — Facebook's product strategy is to keep fragmenting the single News Feed into multiple algorithmic discovery surfaces, each tuned to different intent.
- That fragmentation shifts distribution power further toward whatever ranking system picks the unfollowed sources, making algorithmic recommendation rather than follower graphs the primary way audiences find publishers on the platform.
The trend: Facebook is steadily converting its single follower-driven News Feed into a family of algorithmic discovery surfaces, with each test — rocket ship, More-menu item, official rollout — marking another step in that split.