WhatsApp introduces Communities for bringing common groups together

WhatsApp today announced its plans to introduce Communities, a feature for grouping together similar interest groups.

A Community is basically a collection or groups. Users can create a Community by adding groups featuring a similar theme. Community admins can then manage the groups within and send messages to all groups at once. This way individual conversations related to that group can continue while also getting announcements that impact all groups at the same time. Communities will support end-to-end encryption.

Regarding discoverability, WhatsApp has said that it will not be adding being able to search or discover new communities unlike “other apps”. In an attempt to decrease misinformation spread within community groups, WhatsApp will reduce the number of messages that can be sent from five to one.

WhatsApp may also ban individual community members and admins. It will disband a community if it is aware of illegal or violent activities in a Community.

WhatsApp is also introducing improvements to how individual groups work, regardless of whether they are part of a community or not.

Groups can now have emoji reactions for messages, so members can react to a particular message without sending separate emoji messages. Admins will be able to delete messages in a group, which will then be removed from everyone’s device. File sharing is being upgraded to support files up to 2GB in size. Finally, one-tap voice calling now supports up to 32 members.

The new features will be rolling out this week to a select group of users and slowly expanding to everyone else.

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