WhatsApp rolls out communities feature to supercharge group conversations

Meta chief executive Mark Zuckerberg on November 3 announced the rollout of "communities" feature on WhatsApp, as the messaging app looks to expand its product to support larger discussion groups.

The feature, first announced in April this year, will be available to users across the world in the next few months.

Communities like neighbourhoods, workplaces, non-profit organisations, clubs and schools can now connect multiple groups together under one umbrella to organize group conversations on WhatsApp.

Users will be able to tap on the new communities tab at the top of their chats on Android and at the bottom on iOS to either start a new community or add existing groups to a community.

Once in a community, users can switch between the sub-groups available. Only community admins will be able to broadcast important updates to everyone in the community.

Community admins can also unlink groups from the community and remove individual members from the community, while group admins will be able to delete inappropriate or abusive chats or media for all members of a group.

With the introduction of Communities, messages forwarded more than once will only be sent to one group at a time rather than the previous limit of five groups.

Also Read: WhatsApp's Business bet takes off in India, revenues set to cross $1 bn next year

To complement the launch, WhatsApp has been expanding the limits of its group features. Video calling now supports 32 people on a single call, while groups can now have up to 1,024 people. WhatsApp is also introducing the ability to create in-chat polls.

The company said these features, along with other recent ones like emoji reactions, larger file sharing, and admin delete, would also be available to communities.

The messaging app said it has been working with over 50 organisations across 15 countries to build communities in recent months and claimed these new tools are helping them better organize their chats.

"With Communities, WhatsApp is aiming to raise the bar for how organizations communicate with a level of privacy and security not found anywhere else. The alternatives available today require trusting apps or software companies with a copy of their messages. WhatsApp believes people deserve a higher level of security provided by end-to-end encryption" the company said in a statement.