WhatsApp has unveiled its plans to introduce Communities, a feature for grouping together similar interest groups.
A Community is essentially a collection of groups. Users can create a Community by adding groups featuring a similar theme. Community admins can then manage the groups within and send messages to all groups at once. This way individual conversations related to that group can continue while also getting announcements that impact all groups at the same time. Communities will support end-to-end encryption.
Regarding discoverability, WhatsApp has said that it will not be adding being able to search or discover new communities unlike “other apps”. The company will also be reducing the ability to forward messages from the current limit of five to just one group at a time in an effort to reduce the spread of misinformation within Community groups.
WhatsApp will also be banning individual Community members or admins, and disbanding a Community if it becomes aware of illegal, violent, or hateful activities within a Community.
Other WhatsApp Future Plans
Mark Zuckerberg and WhatsApp have also announced their future plans for new features on the app:
- Message reactions: the ability to react to messages has been already released to some users on WhatsApp beta for Android, and it is coming for more people in the next updates.
- Large File Sharing: after releasing the ability to share media files up to 2GB to some users in Argentina, it may be possible to use the same feature in other countries in the future.
- Bigger group calls: WhatsApp will increase the group call limit to 32 participants in the future, but note that group calls may also have lower participant limits that vary, based on which device everyone in the call is using.
- Admin Delete for everyone: group admins will be able to delete messages for everyone in groups in the future, for moderation reasons.
- Silently leave groups: group participants will be able to silently leave a group in the future.
- New group size: WhatsApp is planning to increase the group capacity when they bring more tools to admins and users in the future.
The new features will be rolling out this week to a select group of users and slowly expanding to everyone else.