WhatsApp announced on 14th April 2022 that it is going to roll out a new feature called “Communities” on its platform, which will go about as an umbrella lodging many groups with thousands of users.
Practically, this is a big group of multiple groups, which can have a huge number of users, with all conversations in the community in WhatsApp will support the end-to-end encryption. Currently, you can add only 256 members to a WhatsApp group.
📣 We're excited to announce a new feature rolling out later this year called Communities!
— WhatsApp (@WhatsApp) April 14, 2022
With Communities, you'll be able to bring related groups together in a way that helps you organize meaningful connections easily and privately. pic.twitter.com/eatAZQCmc3
The admins of those small groups will be given the role of admin in the community to manage group users and will send the communication to the communities.
This will not interrupt the individual discussion within any group while the community message and announcement will keep on delivering in the community.
This permits individual discussions inside any gathering to go on while declarations that relate to everything gatherings can continue to come in. Every one of the talks and messages inside Communities will uphold start to finish encryption as it applies across the stage.
WhatsApp has said that it won’t add a feature that will let these communities be searched or found, unlike other apps.
WhatsApp is also going to reduce the limit to forward messages from the existing limit of 5 messages to only one. This will help restrict the spread of false rumors inside community groups.
Furthermore, WhatsApp is also going to banish individual community members and administrators, and also disband a community assuming that it is hailed for being unlawful, violent, or propagating hateful activities.
WhatsApp is also introducing enhancements to how personal groups work whether they are a piece of a local community.
Group chats will get emoticon responses for messages and before long group talk members will be able to respond to a message without sending separate emoticon messages.
Administrators will also be able to erase messages within a group and they will vanish from other users’ mobiles as well.
Other than this, file sharing on Whatsapp has been upgraded up to 2GB in size and one-tap voice calling will also support up to 32 individuals going ahead.
Initially, these features will be in the testing phase with some users for a span of time and then roll out for all users gradually.
Note: WhatsApp has focused on the TSE (Tribunal Superior Eleitoral) not introducing the “communities” in Brazil before the eventual second round of the presidential election, which is scheduled for October 30, 2022.