WhatsApp today announced its plans to introduce Community, a feature for bringing together similar interest groups.
A community is essentially a collection of groups. Users can create a community by adding groups with a similar theme. Community administrators can then manage the groups within and send messages to all groups at the same time. This way individual conversations related to that group can continue while also receiving announcements that impact all groups at the same time. Communities will support end-to-end encryption.
As for discoverability, WhatsApp said it won’t add the ability to search or discover new communities unlike “other apps”. The company will also reduce the ability to forward messages from the current limit of five to only one group at a time, in an effort to reduce the spread of disinformation within community groups.
WhatsApp will also ban individual community members or administrators and dissolve a community if it becomes aware of illegal, violent, or hateful activities within a community.
WhatsApp is also introducing improvements in how individual groups work, whether or not they are part of a community.
Groups can now have emoji reactions for messages, so members can react to a particular message without sending separate emoji messages. Administrators will be able to delete messages in a group, which will then be removed from everyone’s device. File sharing is being updated to support files up to 2GB in size. Finally, one-touch voice calls now support up to 32 members.
The new features will roll out this week for a select group of users and will slowly expand to all others.
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