As Facebook is nearing its 20th anniversary, the social media giant is reviving one of its oldest and most peculiar features – poking. Meta announced on Thursday improvements to make poking friends easier and more discoverable on the platform.

Facebook has updated its poking recommendations to surface better suggestions on who to poke. Users can now also more easily find the poking functionality through search. Additionally, a new ability allows users to poke a friend directly from their profile after searching for them. 

By typing variations of “poking” in the search bar, users can access the Pokes page and see who’s poked them, as well as a list of suggested friends to poke. 

These small changes have paid dividends, leading to a 1,300% spike in poking activity over the past month according to Facebook’s internal data. “THE POKE IS HAVING A MOMENT. There’s been a 13x spike in poking on Facebook in the past month,” FB’s Thread post reads.

The poking renaissance is being driven largely by Gen Z and millennial users, with over 50% of all pokes now coming from those aged 18-29 years old.

While poking originated with Facebook’s founding in 2004, the novelty feature had faded into obscurity in recent years as it became buried in the platform’s navigation. FB never explicitly defined the purpose of poking, leaving its interpretation open-ended. Some users adopted it as a flirting mechanism, while others simply used it to grab a friend’s attention or spark a “poke war.”

Ahead of its 20th birthday, FB is resurfacing and reframing poking as a lighthearted way for users to simply say “hi” to their friends on the platform. The platform stopped short of announcing additional functionality or gamification around the revived poking feature.

The spike in poking activity speaks to the sticky nature of Facebook’s earliest features, even among younger demographics with no nostalgic connection to them. Whether poking’s second wind is a fleeting fad or makes a more permanent comeback remains to be seen.