WhatsApp is planning on releasing a new feature that adds Communities to the app, allowing users to bring together groups that are capped at 256 users under bigger spaces where administrators could send alerts to thousands.
According to WhatsApp, the groups will have moderating admins who create community rules and can delete offending members just like Facebook Groups. On their blog, they talked about their vision for the communities feature and how they plan to implement it.
“Today we are excited to share our vision for a new feature we are adding to WhatsApp called Communities. Since WhatsApp launched in 2009, we’ve been focused on how we can help people have the next best thing to an in-person conversation when they want to talk to an individual or a group of friends or family. We also frequently hear from people who are using WhatsApp to communicate and coordinate within a community.
Organizations like schools, local clubs, and non-profit organizations now rely on WhatsApp to communicate securely and get things done — especially since the pandemic forced us all to find creative ways to work together while apart. Given the lots of feedback we’ve received, we think there’s more we can do to make it easier to help people manage these busy conversations among these kinds of groups.” — their blog said.
The WhatsApp Communities feature will help users organise all their group chats and find information quicker. For example, in a community for school parents, admins can create subgroups for clubs or sports teams. The messaging service also said communities could be used for clubs or small workplaces.
Further, admins can delete members, offending media and abusive chats. Users can report abuse or remove themselves from a community or group, but admins have the final say over which users and posts are not permitted.
WhatsApp Communities Feature to Make Communication Easier Among Groups of People
The messaging service, which is end-to-end encrypted and has about 2 billion users, said the Communities feature would also be end-to-end encrypted and member phone numbers will only be visible to admins. Users can also silently leave Communities and subgroups without announcing it to the masses.
They also plan to introduce a one-tap voice calling that can include up to 32 people on a call. However, compared to other messaging apps like Telegram, there are no limits to the number of group voice call participants, though group video calls are currently limited to 30 people with the ability for 1000 members to watch a video call.
“It’s been clear for a while that the way we communicate online is changing. For a deeper level of interaction, messaging has become the centre of our digital lives. It’s more intimate and private, and with encryption, it’s more secure too,” Zuckerberg said on Facebook.
The messaging service also stated that they’re making a number of improvements to how groups work on WhatsApp — whether or not they are part of a Community. “We think these will help people share in new ways and reduce overload in larger chats,” the blog stated. The following features will be rolling out in the coming weeks to allow people to test them before Communities are ready.
- Reactions – Emoji reactions are coming to WhatsApp so people can quickly share their opinion without flooding chats with new messages.
- Admin Delete – Group admins will be able to remove errant or problematic messages from everyone’s chats.
- File Sharing – We’re increasing file sharing to support files up to 2 gigabytes so people can easily collaborate on projects.
- Larger Voice Calls – We’ll introduce one-tap voice calling for up to 32 people with an all-new design for those times when talking live is better than chatting.
While Communities will only be available as a new feature on WhatsApp for now, Zuckerberg said that similar messaging features are being developed for Messenger, Facebook and Instagram as well.
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