Side by side
How Degree1 compares to Facebook Groups
The differences go beyond features. They reflect two fundamentally different products with different incentives, different assumptions about privacy, and different definitions of what a group is for.
| Degree1 | Facebook Groups | |
|---|---|---|
| Membership control | Public groups can be joined or discovered by anyone on Facebook. Even closed groups allow anyone to request access; the request process can be inconsistent. | |
| Privacy | Groups can be public, closed, or secret — and those settings can change. Public and closed group content may be visible to non-members or indexed by search engines. | |
| Ads | Facebook is an advertising platform. Ads appear throughout the app, including adjacent to group content, and the entire product is architected to serve them. | |
| Feed algorithm | Facebook decides what group members see and when, based on its engagement algorithm. Posts can be buried or hidden from members without any notice. | |
| Data & ad targeting | Facebook may use your group activity — topics discussed, links clicked, reactions given — to inform the ad targeting it sells to advertisers. | |
| Profile visibility | Your Facebook profile is attached to everything you do in a group. Your name, photo, and public profile are visible to other group members and potentially beyond. | |
| Platform dependency | Facebook Groups require a Facebook account. Groups and their history are subject to Facebook’s moderation policies, feature changes, and business decisions. | |
| Group tools | Events, polls, and group chat are available, but are general-purpose features adapted from the broader Facebook platform, not designed around the needs of small private groups. |
The real difference
Two products. Two completely different purposes.
Facebook is a public social network. It was built to connect people across the open internet, to grow audiences, to follow celebrities and brands, and to keep billions of users engaged for as long as possible each day. Private groups were added to that platform — they are a feature layered onto a product whose fundamental purpose is to maximize public engagement and sell advertising against it. When you put your group on Facebook, your conversations sit on top of an ad engine. That is not incidental; it is the architecture.
Degree1 is a private groups app. That is not a feature — it is the entire product. There is no public layer, no news feed of strangers, no discover tab, no influencers, no ads, and no algorithm trying to keep you scrolling. Every decision in the design of Degree1 — from how membership works, to how the feed is ordered, to what data is collected — flows from a single assumption: your group’s conversations should be visible only to your group.
The result is a different kind of experience. When your group posts something in Degree1, every member sees it. When your admin adds a member, they trust that person is who they say they are. When you share a recommendation or plan an event, that information stays in the room. There is no platform watching over your group, learning from it, and selling what it learns. Your group is simply yours.
Ready to move your group somewhere better?
Degree1 is free to download. Start your private group today on iOS or Android — no Facebook account required.