Facebook Groups help people build communities around local events, hobbies, advocacy, gaming, professional interests, and countless other shared interests. Posts and comments are useful for longer discussions, but real-time chats serve a different purpose: they allow members to have immediate conversations without leaving the community that brought them together.

Meta introduced Community Chats as a way for Facebook Group members to communicate in real time. In 2025, Meta announced that Community Chats in Facebook Groups would be discontinued, directing users toward alternatives such as Messenger Communities and WhatsApp Communities.

Those alternatives can be useful, but they are not the same as having a real-time conversation space directly associated with an existing Facebook Group. Moving conversations into a separate community can fragment participation, require additional setup, and make it harder for group administrators to maintain one coherent community.

We ask Meta to restore an integrated real-time chat option for Facebook Groups—or develop a successor that preserves the same basic functionality.

Any replacement should give administrators effective moderation and reporting tools, allow members to choose whether they participate in chats, provide clear privacy controls, and remain closely connected to the Facebook Group from which the community originated.

Facebook Groups work best when communities can choose how they communicate. Posts, comments, announcements, events, and real-time conversations each serve different purposes. Removing one of those options makes Groups less flexible for communities that relied on it.

We ask Meta to give Facebook Group administrators and members an integrated real-time chat option again.