WhatsApp has announced the Communitiesa new section in the messaging application that will bring together in one place the conversation groups that revolve around a theme or a common social space, such as the children’s school or the activities of neighborhood associations.
WhatsApp Communities are a new space in the messaging application where users can organize conversations by common themeswith the aim of locating the most important messages and disseminating the latest news.
Each community has its own name, for example, that of the children’s school. It is identified with other elements such as a background image, a profile image, and a description. Under the profile photo appears the number of groups (group chat) that have been linked.
The administrator is responsible for creating and managing the community, choosing the groups that will form it, by creating new ones or incorporating existing ones. This person will have control over the chats, the participants and the content that is shared.
This would result, for example, in a community created in a school and managed by the director or person in charge of it. Here you can share the most important updates with all parents, while creating separate groups for specific classes, extracurricular activities or volunteer needs.
Controls and privacy
Users can determine who can invite them to participate in a community, a control that already exists for group chats. And they will have tools to report abusive content, block accounts or leave the communities themselves.
Although the groups will allow conversations of interest to be held between the members, the administrators will also be able to carry out mass communications, by sending messages to all community participants.
From WhatsApp they have highlighted the private nature of these communities. For this reason, it will not be possible to search for or discover new communities, as there will also be limitations to message forwarding. That is, messages that have already been forwarded can only be forwarded to one group at a time, instead of five, which is the current forwarding limit.
And they have stressed that the conversations are protected with the end to end encryption, so that only members of the respective groups have access to their content. As an additional measure, the phone number of the participants will be hidden from the general community, although it will be visible to the administrator and members of the group chat.
The communities have been announced now, but your arrival will be slow. The company has clarified in a meeting with the press, attended by Europa Press, that they continue to work and test this new function, and that in the coming months it will be launched first in some countries in order to have it available globally later. .
What’s new in the groups
Along with the announcement of the communities, WhatsApp has also announced some group news, that in the coming weeks will incorporate the reactions to the messages.
They will also accept files of up to 2GB for sending and receiving through the chatsthe maximum number of participants in voice calls will be increased to 32, and administrators will have a new tool to eliminate wrong or problematic messages.