Communities is coming to WhatsApp, but the rollout will take several months.
To keep its users and attract new ones, social applications, whatever they are, must constantly innovate. Both to ensure the security of users and their data and to offer them ever more successful and fluid experiences. It is constant work. Deployments are frequent, whether to fix bugs, close security vulnerabilities or add features. On WhatsApp for example, users will have soon right to the Communities.
Communities are coming to WhatsApp
It’s been many months since the feature was originally announced last April, but WhatsApp Communities is finally a reality. Almost. Indeed, in a post on its blog, the company explains that the deployment of Communities has started worldwide, but that the function will only be available to everyone “in the coming months”.
Communities are very large groups of users who can organize themselves into several sub-groups around a central topic. WhatsApp suggests that this feature is ideal for neighborhood communities, parents of students from the same school, the same class or colleagues from the same company.
But the deployment will take several months
If you have access to the feature, in your app you will see a new “Communities” tab at the top (on Android) or bottom (on iOS) of the screen. You can then create a new Community or add existing groups to a Community you have already created.
WhatsApp also specifies that the Communities are protected by end-to-end encryption, which is not the case on Slack and Discord, for example.
WhatsApp has also recently added new features, unrelated to Communities. For example, it is possible to create polls. Groups have also been expanded and can accommodate up to 1,024 users. Video calls, on the other hand, can have a maximum of 32 participants.