WhatsApp has been working on updates and augmentations for group chats for quite some time now. Among these, we now have the ability to create and join much larger WhatsApp groups and group admins are able to wield greater powers to ensure group chats stay on topic and nobody steps out of line. Going even further, WhatsApp has also been developing a new Communities feature, which will bring together up to 10 different yet related groups into a WhatsApp Community. We can now report that Mark Zuckerberg has officially launched WhatsApp Communities, so let’s go through the new feature together.
WhatsApp has published a blog post detailing the launch of the new Communities feature, which the company has now started to roll out to all users globally. This means that it should be landing on your phone any minute now.
The plan is for real-world communities such as neighborhoods, schools and workplaces to be able to connect several different groups under a single community umbrella. Users will be able to both start brand new communities from scratch or add existing groups to new communities. Admins will also be able to roll out notifications to all participants and community members.
WhatsApp says that its end-to-end encryption offers this new community feature security systems that are unparalleled for these types of tools. In this current iteration, however, the WhatsApp Communities sound a little similar to Discord servers, which offer users the chance to build multi-faceted communities of multiple different group chats, all within the same space. That being said, it is likely that the key feature of WhatsApp Communities that will set it apart from Discord Servers is the WhatsApp user base. WhatsApp is the most popular messaging app in the world, which means a lot of users are about to have frictionless access to these new community-building and participation features.
To access the new Communities, you simply need to tap the new Communities tab located either at the top of your chats on Android phones or at the bottom on iOS phones.
In other recent WhatsApp news, two interesting new features have been spotted in development.
