New functionality called “Community” is being added to the app of WhatsApp, a platform owned by Meta and used worldwide.
The popular messaging service has been active this year, and the most recent feature addition is a new Communities option that appears next to the standard Chats page on the iOS and Android apps.
The Communities category organizes groups under one roof, especially if they have similar interests. Multiple threads, announcement channels, admin-approved subgroups, and other features are available in communities. If you’re a member of a community, you can create more intimate discussion groups after receiving updates posted there.
Administrators of WhatsApp Communities now have new options at their disposal, such as the ability to broadcast announcements to everyone and manage which groups can join the community. By providing their members with invite links, group administrators will be able to convert their present groups to Communities or create a brand-new Community from scratch.
End-to-end encryption will be used for all community interactions to ensure their confidentiality and security.
Meta stated that they’ll dismantle Communities that contravene the law by carrying out unlawful activities like planning violent acts, participating in human trafficking, and disseminating materials containing child sexual abuse. Both community members and administrators will face bans.
Members of Communities will only be able to forward to one group at a time to prevent the spreading of false information. Before today’s global deployment, Communities had been refined through testing with more than 50 businesses across 15 countries, according to Meta.
Aside from the new Communities page, WhatsApp also announced updates to its Groups function, including the addition of 32-person video calls and Polls to aid in decision-making without upsetting everyone in the group.
The app’s more than 3 billion daily users, who communicate 7 billion voice messages and over 200 billion text messages daily, will find the Communities feature useful. The Communities Tab has now joined the other new features that WhatsApp has added this year, such as categorizing messages by unread count, the ability to secretly leave groups, new privacy options under Last Seen settings, a redesign of the Status, an increase in the file transfer limit, and more.
