Photo: Mourizal Zativa
By: Nick Gambino
WhatsApp is one of the most reliable messaging platforms with a global monthly active user base of about two billion. It’s a great way to keep in touch with friends and family in an end-to-end encrypted environment.
When Meta (then Facebook) bought WhatsApp in 2014 we knew there would be changes over time to better integrate into the social media conglomerate. Now with Meta full steam ahead on the metaverse, they’ve announced a new tab – Communities.
The Communities tab is essentially where you go to create and host a group chat…on steroids. Group chats have traditionally been capped at 256 participants. This new tab will allow you to add thousands of users with the option for creating a number of sub–group chats.
“Communities on WhatsApp will enable people to bring together separate groups under one umbrella with a structure that works for them,” a Meta blog post reads. “That way people can receive updates sent to the entire Community and easily organize small discussion groups on what matters to them.”
Admins of said Communities will have the ability to make announcement messages that’ll push out to everyone in the Community and control the formation and adding of groups.
As the name suggests, Communities is much more than a gaggle of friends looking to expand their group chat. It’s aimed at organizations and groups looking to organize activities and discussions.
An example given in the blog post is a school principal looking to bring parents into a central location so they can receive important information and updates related to classes, volunteering, and extracurricular activities.
In addition to Communities, they’ve also announced a number of features coming to WhatsApp and traditional group chats. These include emoji reactions (finally), size increase on file sharing, up to 32 users on group calls, and the ability for group admins to delete any message in the chat.
Of course, as is expected with WhatsApp, all Communities and group chats will be end-to-end encrypted allowing you to maintain as much privacy as you can while sending messages through the air between mobile devices.
Communities is currently being rolled out to only a select number of users to test it out but will most likely widen to include all users in the near future. Other new features like emoji reactions will hit the general public sooner.
