WhatsApp has introduced a community feature that enables users to bring specific groups under one roof. Community feature can be used by people from all countries including India. Apart from the community feature, WhatsApp also introduced some other features. WhatsApp has also introduced many new features such as the option to include polls in the group chat itself, up to 32 people can participate in a video call, increasing the group members limit to 1024.

The WhatsApp community feature was officially announced by Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg on Thursday. Today we are launching communities on WhatsApp. It makes groups better. Voting and video calling with 32 people started. Everything is secured with end-to-end encryption, so your messages stay private, Zuckerberg said.

The community feature will be available to everyone in the next few days. It is expected to benefit workplaces, schools and local clubs. The new Community tab will be displayed at the top of their chats on the Android app, and at the bottom on iOS. WhatsApp’s communities are also expected to be a major challenge to WhatsApp’s biggest competitor, Telegram, iMessage and other private messaging platforms.

In addition to communities, WhatsApp has also added a poll feature to groups themselves. This feature allows users to quickly conduct polls within the group. Facebook Messenger and Telegram currently allow users to do group polls. Meta also said that WhatsApp’s Poll feature will be secure through end-to-end encryption.

Meanwhile, WhatsApp also announced that group video calls are supported for up to 32 members. WhatsApp currently allows up to 32 members to be added to group voice calls on Android and iOS. The same limit will apply for group video calls.

WhatsApp group members limit increased from 512 to 1024. Small enterprises and businesses will benefit from the new feature. Earlier this year, the number of members was increased from 256 to 512. Meanwhile, Telegram allows users to add up to 2,00,000 people to the group. However, unlike WhatsApp, these group chats do not have end-to-end encryption protection.

∙ What is WhatsApp Community Feature?

Communities will allow users to receive updates sent to the entire community and easily organize small discussion groups about things that matter to them, the company noted in an official blog post. It also brings new tools for admins to send notification messages separately to everyone in the group. Admin can decide and control which groups to include.

It can be said that this is a new feature to manage group chats easily. It is also noteworthy that WhatsApp’s new move is based on the needs of users around the world. This feature makes it easy for schools, local clubs, and non-profit organizations to bring everyone under one roof. So there will be no communication gap. The messaging platform blogged that it hopes to make it easier for communities to bring together all parents in a school to share must-read updates and set up groups about specific classes, extracurricular activities or volunteer needs.

Anyone can create a community and add multiple groups to it. However, groups can be merged only if all the admins of the respective groups accept the community invitation. But only those who belong to a particular group can see the messages in that group. Cannot see messages or WhatsApp numbers of users in other groups in their community. But community admins can also decide which group members can see which messages.

∙ How can it create a flood of messages?

Various parties such as political parties, religious organizations, companies, etc. will now bring groups together to create communities. In India itself, some political parties are investigating how to overcome the limit on the number of members that can be added to WhatsApp groups. With the coming of the community feature, not having to forward and spread messages will also be a joy for many. Campaigns and more can be done easily through communities. There is also a risk of message overload for those in groups.
∙ Want to be afraid?
We don’t hear much about attacks and the like through easy messaging through social media. It was at a time when such attacks were increasing that a message could only be forwarded to five people. However, community operators will have to wait and see if they pose a threat to the community.

∙ Advantages

Many will come under one roof. During the spread of Covid, the common people depended on WhatsApp to get oxygen and medicine. Meta says the new feature will make all of this even easier. Especially in a country like India where there are over 40 crore WhatsApp users, the new feature could be more useful for delivering help and more.
Meta revealed that Communities was introduced in collaboration with more than 50 organizations in 15 countries. It is tailored to suit these organizations.

Other features

Up to 32 people in the group can make group audio and video calls. The size of shareable files has been reduced to 2 GB. Group admins can also remove problematic chats.

Community Admin’s authority to decide which groups to include and which groups to exclude from his community. The Community Admin will also have the power to remove messages in groups related to the Community. The admin will also have the power to remove the troublemakers from the community.

∙ New security features

prevention of spam messages allow group members to post messages only within that group. A normal member of the group cannot search which community exists. However, a group member has the right to ask the admin to deliver a community message to him. The date of availability of all this in India has not been announced. But all the features may be available this year itself.