Earlier this year, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced that WhatsApp is developing a new feature called Communities that will allow users to connect with groups that are important to them on WhatsApp. The feature aims to bring together people who share similar interests. WhatsApp Communities will be available to users beginning today. Along with Communities, WhatsApp is introducing in-chat polls, 32-person video calling, and groups with up to 1024 users.
Today, we’re excited to share our vision for a new WhatsApp feature called Communities. We’ve been focused on how we can help people have the next best thing to an in-person conversation when they want to talk to an individual or a group of friends or family since WhatsApp launched in 2009. “We also frequently hear from people who use WhatsApp to communicate and coordinate within a community,” Mark Zuckerberg said when the feature was announced.
WhatsApp Communities
Communities on WhatsApp will assist people in bringing disparate groups together under one umbrella with a structure that works for them. This will make it easier for people to send and receive updates to the entire community. It will also help people organize discussion groups on topics that are important to them. The new feature will include administrative tools such as announcement messages sent to everyone and control over which groups can be included.
To use the Communities feature, Android users must tap on the new Communities tab at the top of their chats and iOS users must tap on the bottom.
Users can create a new Community from scratch or add existing groups by following the steps. Once you’ve joined a WhatsApp community, you can easily switch between available groups to get the information you need, and administrators can send important updates to everyone in the community. WhatsApp reiterated that the WhatsApp Communities are encrypted from end to end.
Group chat with 1024 people, video call with 32 people at once
You can now add up to 1024 people to a group on WhatsApp. Currently, a group can only contain 200 members. Additionally, you can expand a group video call to include up to 32 individuals. In addition, WhatsApp has launched features for sharing large files, emoji reactions, and admin deletion that would be very useful in communities.
In-chat polls
WhatsApp had long been testing the in-chat polls feature before finally releasing it. WhatsApp will allow you to create a question on in-chat polls and add up to 12 possible answers in a separate screen within the app, as seen in beta versions. WhatsApp has yet to reveal how the feature will look and function. To get the most recent features, you must update WhatsApp from the Play Store or the App Store.