Today, Meta has announced that they are rolling out “Communities” on WhatsApp globally.
The company said that the feature will be available for both Android and iOS users.
Communities like neighborhoods, parents at a school, and workplaces can now connect multiple groups together under one umbrella to organise group conversations on WhatsApp.
Meta
How to use Communities
To get started, tap on the new communities tab at the top of your chats on Android and at the bottom on iOS.
From there you can start a new Community from scratch or add existing groups.
Once you’re in a community, you can easily switch between available groups to get the information you need, when you need it. Admins can send important updates to everyone in the Community.
With Communities, we’re aiming to raise the bar for how organizations communicate with a level of privacy and security not found anywhere else. The alternatives available today require trusting apps or software companies with a copy of their messages – and we think they deserve the higher level of security provided by end-to-end encryption.
Meta
Communities is not the only feature that’s coming out
Besides Communities, Meta has also announced three more features for Whatsapp, which are:
- the ability to create in-chat polls
- 32-person video calls
- Groups with up to 1024 users
Just like emoji reactions, larger file sharing, and admin delete, these features can be used in any group but will be particularly helpful for Communities.
Meta
Meta mentioned that they’ve been working with over 50 organizations in 15 countries to build Communities to meet their needs.
We’re excited that the feedback we’ve heard so far is these new tools are helping groups like these better organize and achieve their goals. There’s a lot more we plan to build and we’ll keep adding features over the coming months. For now, we’re excited to get this into more people’s hands and hear your feedback too.
Meta
In case you want to hear it from the man himself, here’s the video of Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg talking about the new features.
