WhatsApp is working on Communities

WhatsApp is always working on new features to release in future updates and among these, we find something called “Communities”. Let’s figure out what is a community and why it may be useful.

Some weeks ago, XDA Developers spotted some references about Communities, a new WhatsApp feature that will be available in a future update. We preferred to wait for more details and screenshots before announcing the feature, and it’s finally possible today.
What is a community? This name could mean anything, we understand, but a Community is a new place where group admins have more control over groups on WhatsApp, mainly to group other groups easily.

As you can see in this screenshot, people will be able to create a Community chat. It’s like a group chat at the moment, so nothing like a social network: it’s still a private place between people protected by end-to-end encryption.
In this screenshot, you can also notice a different layout for the community icon: yes, community icons are square with rounded edges to distinguish the community from a group chat. WhatsApp has wrongly enabled this layout — and immediately removed — for all profile photo thumbnails, and several users discovered this layout reporting it under the tweet about the WhatsApp beta for Android 2.21.21.7 update.

Admins can send messages in this group chat and they will be able to group some groups related to the community: for example, a degree course can be considered a community, and all its teaching classes are groups included in this community. Another example: the official Discord server of WBI can be considered a community, while its channels are groups of the community.
The community will offer some tools to admins to better manage all groups included in the community but, seen that this feature is under development, these advanced tools are still unknown at the present.

Admins can invite other people to join the community. Users can be manually added or they can join using a “Community Invite Link”, if the admin has shared it privately or publicly:

When you join a community, it does not necessarily mean you can immediately send messages to all groups of the community, but further purposes will be discovered in the future.

Note that “Community” is under development on WhatsApp beta for Android and WhatsApp beta for iOS, so its appearance, features, anything else may change before the official release to beta testers. Like any other feature under development, there’s not even a release date available: things like that cannot be predicted when they are ready to be released.
Further details are still unknown and unavailable, but we’re following the development and we will inform you about any other changes and addition.

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