WhatsApp introduced communities, a new way for schools and neighborhoods to organize privately and share information with their members.
WhatsApp adds a new way to gather users and chat with communities, which is designed for organizations such as schools and neighborhoods to coordinate and share media.
Communities are WhatsApp’s answer to Telegram’s massive groups and channels, and while it’s unclear how many users can join the community, they won’t be as many as “hundreds of thousands” of people chatting to other users, according to an official WhatsApp post. in Thursday. Communities will be inherently private and encrypted from end to end.
Along with communities, WhatsApp adds modern features that have been in competing messaging apps for some time, such as emoji responses and expanding voice calls to 32 people, up from eight participants before. Users can share even larger files and media now with an extended file size of 2 GB, compared to 100 MB before. And the group’s administrators will now be able to remove messages from everyone’s chats if, say, someone says something problematic.
The above features will be introduced to users in the coming weeks, while it is less clear when communities will be added to WhatsApp – they will “start releasing this slowly,” Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg said in a statement Thursday. But he also noted that community messages (whether branded as communities or otherwise) will also come to Messenger, Facebook and Instagram at some point.
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