WhatsApp messaging service begins testing Communities feature

WhatsApp has announced the Communities feature. Thanks to Communities, group conversations on the messaging service can be accommodated in a virtual community. The feature is first being tested in certain countries. Then comes the worldwide release.

Communities on WhatsApp will allow people to bring separate groups together into one overarching structure that suits their needs in a blog post from the American Messaging Service. The company gives an example of a school where the management allows all communication to take place via a Community, which in turn also contains different group discussions per subject or theme.

According to WhatsApp, the administrators of these virtual communities can send updates to all or certain members, set up new discussion groups between members and choose whether new group conversations are included in the Community. Messages and phone calls in a virtual community will be end-to-end encrypted.

The messaging service also introduces some new features for group conversations. First of all, emoji reactions are added, a group manager is given delete rights and files can be shared up to 2GB. It will also be possible to make voice calls with up to 32 people. The new group chat features will be introduced in the coming weeks.

The Communities feature becomes according to Engadget tested in certain countries in the coming weeks, but it is not clear which ones. Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg states in a blog post that the feature will be rolled out slowly and that it will become a very important part of the messaging service. “I suspect that Communities will represent an important evolution for WhatsApp and online communication in general,” said the man. According to him, Facebook, Messenger and Instagram are working on a similar feature.

WhatsApp Communities