WhatsApp Communities: Group Conversations on a New Level

If you like group communication on WhatsApp, you have probably already heard of Communities – the metagroup feature designed to simplify both communication and administering of these. Now, WhatsApp reveals even more about the Community approach. At the same time, it confirms that this update won’t arrive tomorrow.

Communities is the feature that can simply be described as “groups for groups”. Within these groups, admins will be able to send messages to members to all of the groups, apply common rules and politics, and manage these groups more efficiently. This feature had been unofficially confirmed before it was announced by the service officially.

For regular users, communities are the place where they can participate in groups joined by common interests or members in one place. They will be able to read group profiles and request to join them if they wish. Still, being a member of a community does not give users any access to any private data beyond the groups they have joined. Admins, in their turn, can access numbers and profiles of members of all the groups within the community. Also, they can send announcements that will be delivered to all the community members regardless of particular groups they are in.

There will be more about Communities, as WhatsApp obviously means to make them an analog to old-time forums. First, Communities will be launched in test mode in some select countries. After the testing period, the update will arrive all over the world.

Along with this long-awaited announce, WhatsApp introduces some more new features. Now users will be able to share larger files (up to 2GB) in P2P mode. This only applies to the documents users send in private messages or groups. With this move, WhatsApp finally catches up with Telegram.

What do you expect from Communities? If you are an admin of one or several groups, do you find this innovation useful? As for files, do you often share large ones? Tell us about your WhatsApp experience and expectations in the comments if you please!