WhatsApp unveiled Communities on Thursday as a new tool to assist users in having many groups under one roof. The feature was discovered while testing on the Web months prior to the announcement. Communities on WhatsApp will give administrators new options, such as the capacity to send a single message to every member and management over which groups can be a part of a specific community. Along with the Communities feature, WhatsApp also unveiled a number of enhancements, such as an increased file sharing limit, reactions, and the capacity to support 32 simultaneous group audio calls.
WhatsApp has reportedly been testing the Communities feature for the past few months. Users will be able to have various groups under one roof, allowing them to receive updates from these groups on a single screen rather than having to wade through various chats. This will be useful for schools, neighborhood clubs, and non-profit organizations that must manage various groups on the app.
A Community’s description and all of the groups that are a part of it can be viewed by users. However, it will prevent members of one group from seeing the contact information of members of another group. However, they will be able to see how many people are available to join their groups. Naturally, administrators will also have access to all group members’ phone numbers.
Although they will have the ability to join other groups in their Community, users of one group won’t be able to see the discussions happening in other groups.
Additionally, new tools will be available to admins to help them better control community debates. The ability for administrators to send out notification messages to everyone will be one of the tools. Additionally, group administrators will be able to decide which groups can be a part of their Communities.
In a blog post, WhatsApp stated that it believes communities would make it simpler for school principals to gather all of the parents of the school to exchange essential updates and form groups for particular subjects, extracurricular activities, or volunteer needs.
Communities’ main goal appears to be to make it simple for users to create smaller discussion groups on the platform, which might make WhatsApp an even more practical tool for group conversations. Additionally, it would assist distinguish essential groups from any of their random family groupings, where they typically receive only “Good morning” messages or other banal material.
In Communities, users will have the same choices for reporting abuse, blocking accounts, and leaving any of them as they do in ordinary groups. Additionally, WhatsApp pledged to keep using end-to-end encryption to secure communications sent within Communities.
By obscuring phone numbers from the general public, the feature will preserve user privacy. In a thorough document describing the Communities feature, WhatsApp emphasized that there will also be “appropriate limits on size, discoverability, and forwarding.”
To stop abuse in Communities, the business says, “We will rely on all available unencrypted information, including the Community name, description, and user reports.”
When exactly Communities will be accessible to people all over the world is unknown. However, WhatsApp told Gadgets 360 that it would be testing the functionality over the following few months in a select country before starting to roll it out internationally after those tests are finished.
In addition to Communities, WhatsApp groups now have emoji reactions to let users express their thoughts on specific messages without clogging up chats with more text. Similar to how you may do on Facebook Messenger or Apple’s iMessage, this allows you to add reactions to messages.
For some time, WhatsApp has been testing responses. Recently, the new addition started to show up for certain Android beta testers.
According to Whats App, Emoji Reactions Will Be Available in Both Private and Public Chats
Group administrators will have the ability to individually delete incorrect or problematic texts from everyone’s chats. Additionally, WhatsApp is providing 32-person one-tap voice calling with a brand-new interface. Currently, a group voice call can have up to eight people on it.
Telegram, a rival to WhatsApp, does not have a cap on the number of group voice chats, though. Although you can have up to 30 people on a video call at once on the app, it also allowed users to have up to 1,000 viewers for group video calls last year.
Furthermore, WhatsApp is expanding file sharing to accommodate files up to 2GB in size. From the current file size restriction of 100MB, this represents a huge increase. Both individual conversations and groups will be subject to the increased file sharing size limit. It has long undergone testing.
It is crucial to note that the upgrade will only apply to documents and will not affect media assets like pictures, videos, and voicemails because they will still be subject to the previous 16MB limit. Additionally, the higher restriction is the same as the 2GB Telegram file sharing size limit.
