In response to customer feedback, WhatsApp will shortly launch Communities, an innovation that will allow users to better manage groups and have more meaningful conversations.

A WhatsApp representative described Communities as a “directory of groups,” adding that the feature will allow anyone to “create their own community of their own with varied groups yet having certain common linkages.” The spokesman went on to say that this was “based on feedback that people get lost because of the multiple groups”.

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Anyone will be able to establish a community and invite multiple groups to participate. However, the groups will only become members of the community if their respective administrators accept the invitation. For example, you could have one community for a specific corporation that has many groups of distinct user sets within it.

Only people in a specific group, however, will be able to see the messages in that group and will have no access to the messages or phone numbers of users in other groups within their community. The community, on the other hand, has a broadcast option to message everyone across groups, but this option is only available to those who have approved these communications.

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Meta emphasised how average people used WhatsApp during the second wave in India to source oxygen and medications, noting that a tool like this would have been incredibly useful in a situation like that. In India, WhatsApp has 400 million users.

As part of this new deployment, certain more features are being delivered. Users will, for example, be able to respond to messages in the same way that they do on Facebook and Instagram. They will also be able to connect to an audio call with all members of a group if the number is less than 32. Furthermore, the file size restriction has been raised to 2GB. Furthermore, group administrators will be able to delete any inappropriate messages from everyone’s chats.

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The representative stated that communities provide admins additional power, adding, “The community admin has all the controls on which group comes in and which group stays out. They can also remove problematic messages in a group.” They can also remove offensive posts from a group.” Community administrators will also be able to unlink groups if they detect them engaging in improper or abusive talk.

There are other security elements included as well. Users will now be allowed to share solely within the group to avoid spamming. Furthermore, users will be unable to search for communities, however, they will be able to suggest that admins add them.

Communities is expected to be rolled out later in the year.