Meta quietly slid a new app called Forum into the App Store last week with no big rollout, no campaign, no influencer push, just there one morning like it had been waiting for us. The app pulls Facebook Groups out of the main feed and gives them their own home, kind of a Reddit situation but powered by the account you have been logged into since flip phones were still a thing. Posts you make on Forum show up on Facebook and the other way around, so it is less a new network and more a side door into the one you already live in.
Naturally we downloaded it. And naturally, the first thing it did was hand us our entire 2009. The oldest post that surfaced was from 17 years ago. Seventeen. Years. Ago. A whole high schooler ago.
There we were, scrolling past groups we joined when George W. Bush was still in the White House. I Don’t Care How Comfortable Crocs Are, You Look Like A Dumbass.” “When I Was Your Age, We Had To Walk To The TV To Change The Channel.” “If This Group Reaches 1,000,000 My Dad Will Get Me A Puppy.” “I Go Out Of My Way To Step On Crunchy Looking Leaves.” Groups that meant absolutely nothing and somehow everything. Groups you joined because your cousin joined and the homecoming court joined and that boy you liked joined and clicking that little blue button felt like belonging to something.
It was a different internet. Before the algorithm decided what you saw, before brand pages had strategy decks, before every post was content. You logged on, you poked somebody, you joined “Black Girls Are Magic” before it was a hashtag, you took the “Which Sex And The City Character Are You” quiz, you wrote on somebody’s wall like it was a yearbook, and you went to sleep. That was the whole platform.
Forum opening up those old groups feels like opening a shoebox of pictures. You forgot the dances, the diss tracks, the Soulja Boy choreography breakdowns in the comments, the “Top 8” wars on MySpace that bled into Facebook drama. You forgot that we used to post 47 pictures from one party with names like “summer 09 my bday weekend pt 3” and tag every single person whether they were in the picture or not. You forgot the relationship status updates that doubled as press releases. “It’s Complicated” was a whole love language.
And the news. Lord, the news we forgot. Seventeen years ago Barack Obama was sworn in and Black Twitter did not exist yet, so we organized in Facebook Groups and BlackPlanet inboxes. Chris Brown and Rihanna were the couple, until they were not, and the whole timeline lost its mind. Beyoncé had just dropped “Single Ladies” and we were all in our living rooms trying to do the choreography. Lil Wayne released Tha Carter III and the city of New Orleans went up. Kanye dropped 808s and Heartbreak and confused everybody before he made sense. Michael Jackson passed and the whole internet grieved together for the first time. T.I. was on house arrest recording Paper Trail. Plies was somehow everywhere.
Looking at those old groups is looking at a version of the culture before everything got monetized, optimized, brand safe, and AI assisted. We were just on there being twenty something and broke and hopeful and petty in 14 different group threads at once.
Which is why we are starting one.
Baller Alert Throwback is our new group, a dedicated room for everybody who was logging on in 2008, 2009, 2010 and wants to time travel together. Old groups you joined and forgot. Pictures that should have stayed in the camera roll but we are posting them anyway. The albums, the mixtapes, the BET countdowns, the 106 and Park top 10, the songs of the summer, the fits, the parties, the gossip that ran the timeline before there was a timeline. The news you forgot was news. The celebrity beefs that felt like the end of the world. The stuff your kids will not believe really happened.
Twenty years of culture has run through Baller Alert, and Forum is giving us the perfect excuse to walk back through it. Search Baller Alert Throwback on Facebook or in the new Forum app and pull up. Bring your archive. Bring your receipts. Bring that one picture from the function in 2009 where everybody had the same shutter shades on.
We will be there, going through the shoebox with you.
