WhatsApp said it is working on a new feature dubbed Communities, which would allow people to bring together separate groups on the messaging service under one umbrella.
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The feature would contain tools, enabling admins to send announcement messages to everyone in a community, organise smaller discussion groups and control which groups can join their community.
The Meta-owned messaging platform’s feature could potentially allow admins to send announcements to a community with about a thousand users or more by linking groups, which now have a limit of 256 members. Messages in a community would be protected with end-to-end encryption.
Communities will be available later this year as a new tab in WhatsApp and will be free to use, Will Cathcart, Head of WhatsApp at Meta said on Twitter. He noted that WhatsApp could offer “premium features to enterprise” in the future, according to a Reuters report.
Besides, the messaging service is introducing several improvements to how groups work, that people can start trying before the arrival of the Communities feature. These changes include giving group admins the authority to remove errant or problematic messages from everyone’s chats; increasing file sharing to support files up to 2 gigabytes; one-tap voice calling for up to 32 people with all-new design; and emoji reactions.
Recently, WhatsApp launched some features to help make sending and receiving voice messages easier, like allowing users to pause a voice recording and resume it later at their convenience.
