In the tech industry, it is not surprising that rivals learn from each other, picking up features from each-other, or creating equivalent implementations. This holds true for thebest messaging appsas well, with popular apps like Telegram and Discord dictating the essential features. Although popular, Meta’s WhatsApp has been playing catch-up recently, building the Communities feature for beta testers before rolling it out to the masses. Now, WhatsApp is working on a general chat room from Communities, much like Discord’s general channel in a server.
WhatsApp has been hard at work buildingCommunities, which are a neat way for people with similar interests to collate various chat groups under a single umbrella, called a community. Each group can have a dedicated purpose, and community members can choose which ones they want to participate in. Unlike the average WhatsApp group chat, communities give participants and administrators more control, with features like a dedicated chat for announcements, messagesorting options, anddetailed explainersfor how to get started with the new feature.
New general group chat in communities
With the recent beta update to version 2.23.19.6 on the Google Play Store, WhatsApp has started testing a new general group chat for new communities, much like the announcements group. After testing the feature,WABetaInforeports the general group chat is added by default to all new communities created in WhatsApp. It is meant to be a space where new participants can find an amicable space to start engaging with a community, and veterans can talk to each-other without cluttering up other topical group chats in the community.
Like any ordinary group chat, you can add only 1,024 members to the new general chat, and WhatsApp adds all new community members to this group by default. This group chat is auto-created when you start a new community on WhatsApp, much like the announcements channel. However, administrators can delete the group chat from the community info page if they’d rather operate without it.
Oddly enough, communities already formed don’t have an option to add this general group immediately. WABetaInfo says WhatsApp has no plans to provide an option either. Moreover, WhatsApp doesn’t hide participant phone numbers in the group info screen. We hope these two aspects are modified suitably in the future. For now, the option to auto-add a general group chat to a new community is rolling out to more beta testers. While the latest beta build has this feature, older 2.23.19 versions are also compatible.
