After several months of testing, WhatsApp welcomes Communities, a function to create subgroups within groups of thousands of participants. A major evolution for messaging.
Announced at the beginning of the year and after many months of testing, Communities are finally coming to WhatsApp ! The principle is very simple: it is a question of allowing any collective – such as neighborhood associations, parents of pupils or even companies – to organize and manage several conversations around a very specific subject. For example, members of a restaurant can form their community and create a thread for the chefs, a thread for the waiters and one for the whole team. Ditto for a class, which can access a channel for homework support, one for teacher announcements, one for absences, etc. The function can also be useful for bringing together all the students and/or parents of students in a high school or college, for example. The principal, who is also an administrator, can thus pass on important information to all the students in his establishment or to certain classes only. To sum up, it’s about creating subgroups within a group – a bit like what is already done on Discord and Microsoft Teams – which is very practical for many activities.
Communities: making WhatsApp a tool for professionals
The new Communities tab is located at the top of the application for the Android version, and at the bottom of the screen from the iOS version. Just press “New community” to create one, and then add new groups or some already existing ones. To note that it is impossible for the members of a group within a community to address the whole of it, this right being reserved for the administrator. Meta also puts a lot of emphasis on security “unmatched” exchanged data – despite the controversies that regularly splatter the firm on this subject: “Communities are inherently private, which is why we will continue to protect messages with end-to-end encryption. This security technology has never been more necessary to protect people’s privacy and security.”
WhatsApp does not forget its fundamentals: instant messaging, and in particular groups. In addition to the Communities function, the firm announced some developments for group discussions, whether or not they are part of a community. Thus, it is now possible to create polls in discussions, and video calls can now accommodate up to 32 members. Another change: groups can now have up to 1,024 members, up from 512 so far. These functions, combined with the possibility of reacting to messages with emojis – which avoids overloading the discussion thread unnecessarily – the possibility of sharing large files – up to 2 GB per file – and the possibility for administrators to delete messages, will be very useful for managing communities, and show Meta’s desire to make their instant messaging a tool for the professional world, gradually establishing itself as a serious competitor for Teams, Zoom or even Google Meet. All of these new features begin rolling out worldwide this Thursday, November 3. They will therefore arrive gradually over the coming months.
