WhatsApp announced today its plans to introduce communities, a feature to group similar interest groups.
The community is essentially a collection of groups. Users can create a community by adding groups with a similar theme. Community administrators can then manage their groups and send messages to all groups at once. In this way, individual conversations related to this group can continue, while receiving messages that affect all groups at the same time. Communities will support end-to-end encryption.
As for discovery, WhatsApp said it would not add the ability to search or discover new communities unlike “other apps.” The company will also reduce the ability to forward messages from the current limit of five to just one group at a time in an attempt to reduce the spread of misinformation within community groups.
WhatsApp will also ban individual members or administrators of the community and will dissolve the community if it finds out about illegal, violent or hateful activities within the community.
WhatsApp also introduces improvements to the way individual groups work, whether they are part of a community or not.
Groups can now have emoji reactions for messages, so members can respond to a specific message without sending individual emoji messages. Administrators will be able to delete messages in a group, which will then be removed from everyone’s devices. File sharing is upgraded to support files up to 2 GB in size. Finally, one-touch voice calls now support up to 32 members.
The new features will be introduced this week for a select group of users and will slowly expand to everyone else.
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