WhatsApp’s Communities feature allows admins to club multiple groups under a large umbrella.
Meta chief executive officer Mark Zuckerberg announced a global roll-out of the WhatsApp Communities feature along with other updates like increasing the number of users in a group to 1024, in-chat polls, and 32-person video calling.
Talking about Communities on WhatsApp, Zuckerberg said “it makes groups better by enabling sub-groups, multiple threads, announcement channels, and more.”
The Communities feature allows admins to club multiple groups under a large umbrella or a community and for this, a new tab on the instant messaging app has been added. A whole new community can be made from scratch or by adding existing groups. In April this year, WhatsApp announced it was working on building the Communities feature, which has now been rolled out globally for both iOS as well as Android users and will be available to everyone over the next few months.
This feature empowers the admins in a way that they will be responsible for creating and managing Communities on WhatsApp and can send updates to everyone in the Community. Furthermore, the admins could also unlink groups from the Community and can even entirely remove individual members from the Community. In addition, inappropriate or abusive chats or media can be deleted by the group admins for all the members of the group.
All messages/media sent using the Communities tab will continue to be end-to-end encrypted as all other messaging on WhatsApp. Further to help protect users’ privacy, their phone numbers will be hidden from the Community at large and only be visible to Community admins and people of the same group. Users can easily switch between available groups once they are in the community.
“Communities like neighborhoods, parents at a school, and workplaces can now connect multiple groups together under one umbrella to organize group conversations on WhatsApp,” the app said in a blog. “With Communities, we’re aiming to raise the bar for how organizations communicate with a level of privacy and security not found anywhere else.”
Apart from the Communities feature, WhatsApp also released updates like in-chat polls, 32-person video calls, and groups with up to 1024 users. “Just like emoji reactions, larger file sharing (up to 2GB), and admin delete, these features can be used in any group but will be particularly helpful for Communities,” the company added.
