WhatsApp’s Communities feature is live for beta users

Priya BhadaurjaAugust 30, 2022

0 269

WhatsApp’s Communities feature is live for beta users, WhatsApp having a big upgrade in Group chats.

In what appeared to be a hopeful challenge to Slack, the social messaging service WhatsApp revealed in April that it was working on a WhatsApp new ‘Communities’ feature, a method for various groups to come “under one roof.” The function is now accessible to beta testers.

Over the last several months, the Meta-owned messaging platform has gradually rolled out incremental enhancements, including Communities, 512-person groups, 32-person video chats, a 2GB file-sharing limit increase, emoji replies, and “last seen” statuses that enable you conceal it from certain individuals.

Communities is now accessible in “limited countries,” claims WhatsApp. You can add up to 10 groups to a community if the capability is already accessible to you. Communities also offers group administrators additional authority; they may exclude members and delete posts they feel “errant or troublesome.” Within that Community, members may also split off into more compact discussion groups.

Communities will show up in a different page on the app, claims WABetaInfo. A screenshot of the app’s Communities tab, which normally replaces the camera icon, was also uploaded on the website.

End-to-end encryption will be added to the Communities feature, WhatsApp revealed to Mashable in April. However, remember the controversy around WhatsApp’s revised privacy policy from the previous year.

The beta-tested version of the functionality now supports communities of up to 10 groups, each with a maximum of 512 people. Users can join the community subgroups they choose and leave a group while still remaining in the larger community.

We are unable to speculate on how soon we could anticipate seeing this functionality made available to all customers as it is currently under testing. If this seems like a feature you would want to see on your version of WhatsApp, you will need to keep checking back with us. We’ll let you know as soon as there’s an update on the feature. We have been talking about what these official new symbols represent for the future of the app in other current WhatsApp news.