Do you use WhatsApp at university, to organize yourself with other students, or to chat with your family via a group chat? WhatsApp wants to improve this type of communication in the application, and announces for this the launch of Communities.
“We observed that WhatsApp was frequently used by certain communities to communicate and organise. Some structures, such as schools, local associations or non-profit organizations, now rely on WhatsApp to communicate securely and organize themselves”explains WhatsApp in a blog post.
WhatsApp launches a series of features around Communities
And to add that the phenomenon “has increased since the pandemic, which has forced us to find creative solutions to collaborate despite the distance”. With Communities, WhatsApp claims to take into account “many comments” of its users who sometimes criticize the application for the lack of certain useful functionalities found on competing solutions, in particular iMessage or Telegram.
Communities actually allow you to bring together several “groups” or discussions under the same page. Thus, WhatsApp explains, “members will be able to receive announcements sent to the wider community while chatting in smaller groups created around specific areas of interest”. These groups will be easier to administer thanks to the arrival of a series of new features.
For example, it will be possible to react with a simple emoji to messages as is the case on competing applications. Administrators can “delete inappropriate messages or problematic for all members of the discussion”, details WhatsApp. the file sharing is improving with, in particular, a limit increased to 2 GB “to facilitate collaboration”.
Finally, the group calls will now be able to go up to 32 participants. WhatsApp emphasizes that these communities are private spaces protected as always by end-to-end encryption. A priori, these communities have been in the process of being deployed for a few hours, without it being known whether the change is purely server-side or whether a new version of the application will be available.
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If in doubt, try updating WhatsApp to see if the Communities feature is available on your device. What do you think of these new features around Communities? Share your opinion in the comments.
