WhatsApp Communities is rolling out to everyone, supercharging all your group chats
WhatsApp has been hard at work on adding new features to its platform. The Meta-owned service has lagged behind Telegram and other messaging services in terms of features but has been looking to change that by aggressively rolling out new additions and enhancements. In April this year,WhatsApp announced Communities, a way to manage multiple groups better. Over six months later, the company is officially rolling out Communities globally, though the feature will take a few months to show up for everyone.
Think of Communities as a supergroup to manage all your related groups. A Community will house similar groups, and you’re able to manage them all from one place. If you are the admin of some common groups, a Community will make your life easier by allowing you to send important updates across them at once. Communities will be beneficial for managing neighborhood, workplace, or school groups. If you have used Facebook Groups or Discord, you will grasp how Communities work in WhatsApp in no time. The concept is similar, with the added benefit of end-to-end encryption for complete privacy.
Once Communities is available for your account, it will appear at the top of your chats in WhatsApp for Android.
If you don’t care about Communities, WhatsApp is also adding several other features to enhance your group conversations. Firstly, you can now do group video calls with up to 32 people, a feature thatMark Zuckerberg first announced WhatsApp was testing in Septemberthis year.With support for call links, adding 32 people to a call will be much more manageable. Secondly, you can create in-chat polls, anotherfeature that WhatsApp has been testing for months. Lastly, you can add up to 1,024 users to a group, up from 512 people.
WhatsApp plans to continue adding new features to Communities in the coming months. Hopefully, this will also include better moderation tools to fight misinformation.
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