WhatsApp is one of the most downloaded applications in the world, but the competition remains tough. And lately, the Meta messaging service has been constantly announcing new features to improve the user experience on it.
Among the most important announcements made by WhatsApp this year is the “Communities” feature made in April. While the application has been allowing you to participate in group discussions for years, the “Communities” will make it possible to better organize these discussions, thanks to functions similar to those we have on apps such as Slack or Discord.
Communities allow you to better organize group discussions
“WhatsApp communities will bring together different groups within the same structure”we read in the announcement of WhatsApp. “This way, members will be able to receive announcements sent to the wider community while chatting in smaller groups created around specific areas of interest. Communities will also offer powerful new tools for admins, including the ability to send announcement messages to all community members and control which groups can be added to them. »
For example, if a school opens a community on WhatsApp, it can easily deliver important announcements to parents. And at the same time, it will be possible to create groups for each class or groups for each extracurricular activity. And like simple chats on WhatsApp, communities also benefit from end-to-end encryption, which ensures the confidentiality of message content while in transit through Meta’s servers.
The novelty is coming to some WhatsApp users
And the good news is that little by little, this novelty is becoming available. Indeed, according to an article published by TechCrunch, Meta did not give details on this deployment, but it did confirm that early access was indeed given to a certain number of users.
For its part, the WABetaInfo site indicates that the Communities feature is compatible with two versions of WhatsApp, one in beta and another stable. But even if you have these updates, you don’t necessarily have the new feature, since it would activate on the server side.
In any case, the fact that WhatsApp has decided to roll out communities to a small number of users signals that development is moving forward.
An equivalent of Facebook groups on WhatsApp
Since its interface is quite similar to those of Discord or Slack, WhatsApp’s Communities function is often compared to these two apps (one is popular among gamers, while the other targets businesses). However, the novelty of WhatsApp can also be seen as an equivalent of Facebook groups on the messaging service.
Moreover, it should be remembered that this interface to Discord or Slack to better organize discussions will also arrive on Facebook groups. This was announced by Meta in June.
