Meta, the parent company of Facebook, WhatsApp, and Instagram, is taking another step in the transition of its flagship messaging service, WhatsApp, which is slowly evolving into a new social platform.
WhatsApp has just introduced Communities, described as „a significant evolution“ and „the next generation of private messaging“ by Mark Zuckerberg in a recent post on his Facebook profile. „With today’s launch, […] we will allow people to not only communicate with close friends and contacts but also with all the different communities in their lives,“ added the CEO of Meta.
Communities are a new way to classify and organize groups. The change, which will be rolled out gradually to all WhatsApp users in the coming weeks, opens up group chats to a broader circle.
With Communities, different group chats sharing a common theme will be grouped together under one umbrella. The idea behind this new feature is to provide more structure to the sea of groups that clutter most users‘ WhatsApp accounts.
The change may seem minor, but it is significant as it introduces the social concept of communities into the world’s most popular messaging service (also in Catalonia) and thus definitively moves away from the platform’s conception as a purely personal communication service, from person to person.
How do Communities work on WhatsApp?
Communities allow users to gather different groups around a common theme. For example, a WhatsApp user who is part of a relatively active neighborhood community may be part of various group chats where their neighbors are also present.
The neighborhood collaboration group, the group where building meetings are organized, the group about parking lot humidity, the one for sharing neighborhood news and activities… The new Communities option will bring them all together, allowing the administrators of the neighborhood groups to create a supergroup for the community.
In the case of school-related chat groups, administrators will also have the option to create a supergroup, a community, related to the educational institution, which will bring together the group chats for each grade, extracurricular activities, field trips, birthday parties, volunteer groups for organizing the next celebration, etc.
Although WhatsApp points out that the design presented is not final, it is likely that the community space will be topped by a large cover photo and a small profile picture. An icon in the top right corner will provide access to settings, where users will likely be able to configure their relationship with each community and, for example, adjust notifications or privacy settings.
Next, the community’s name will appear followed by thumbnails of some of its members and the number of group chats it includes, ending with a description of the community’s purpose and a list of all the subgroups it encompasses.
WhatsApp users will be able to autonomously decide who can add them to a community, just as they can currently decide who can add them to a group chat. Additionally, leaving a group that belongs to a community will be done silently: the group will not receive a notification every time a member joins or leaves the chat.
Announcements and new powers for administrators
The role of administrators will be crucial in launching a community on WhatsApp, and in fact, their role has gained weight in the other updates that the platform has announced. Group administrators will be the only ones able to link group chats to a community or create a new group from scratch to connect it, as well as manage which groups are part of it.
Having related groups under the same supergroup will also allow administrators to make announcement messages to all groups in a community at the same time, crosswise, for example, notifying them of news or sending a reminder that may interest everyone. This feature, called announcements, will pin the selected messages within the community tab, at the top of the list of included group chats, and will currently have the capacity to notify up to thousands of users simultaneously, in case the different member groups have similar numbers. They can also be anchored as reminders.
Before Communities, more updates to WhatsApp
WhatsApp has not announced an exact date for the arrival of communities to all users, although they indicate that it will be rolled out gradually „in the coming weeks.“ Zuckerberg, in fact, speaks of a „slow“ rollout. It has been announced that even before communities are available to everyone, other updates will arrive. Among the new features about to come to WhatsApp, the messaging service has highlighted reactions, a way to respond to messages less invasively for the rest of the chat members that had been leaked before and is eagerly awaited by many users.
Another novelty will be the new limit on voice calls, which will be able to accommodate up to 32 users at the same time in a single call. The limit will also be extended in file size: currently set at 100 MB, files of up to 2 GB can now be shared, although this will not affect the current limit applied to photos and videos, 15 MB, accompanied by the usual compression system that WhatsApp applies to multimedia files.
Finally, WhatsApp has also announced a new power for administrators: „Admin Delete,“ that is, the new ability for administrators to delete any message they consider problematic and that has been shared by other users. This way, administrators can also moderate conversations and decide what members of a group chat read – and what they don’t.
Security, privacy, and jabs at Telegram
Both WhatsApp, in its official presentation message, and Mark Zuckerberg, in his personal Facebook profile post, have emphasized the security and privacy aspects of their service. According to them, Communities will include the same end-to-end encryption elements that all chats on the service currently have, clearly anticipating the justified reservations that users may have about trying out any new feature from Meta.
„Communities are inherently private, and that’s why we will continue to protect messages with end-to-end encryption. […] Close-knit groups (schools, members of a religious congregation, even companies) want and need to be able to maintain secure and private conversations without WhatsApp controlling every word.“
Meta’s move with WhatsApp Communities seeks new layers of socialization within its services and, as Mark Zuckerberg has announced, they will not be limited to their messaging service: „We will also create community messaging features for Messenger, Facebook, and Instagram.“
In any case, the novelty of WhatsApp could also be considered a defensive update regarding Telegram, Meta’s biggest competitor in the Western world of messaging and, in many aspects, much more advanced than WhatsApp. In fact, in the official presentation message, Meta couldn’t resist sending a jab at Pavel Durov’s service: „While other apps create chats for hundreds of thousands of people, we are focusing on supporting the groups that are part of our daily lives.“
WhatsApp aims to be the communication tool we use with our closest people, intimate groups of friends and family, and now also our closest communities: neighbors, colleagues, and schoolmates.