WhatsApp unveiled new features on Thursday, April 14, starting with the upcoming launch of "communities," which will allow their administrators to bring together several discussion groups in the same space and thus address a large number of people. The messaging service, owned by the American Meta (Facebook, Instagram), intends to meet the needs of "certain structures, such as schools, local associations or non-profit organizations ," which "now rely on WhatsApp to communicate securely and organize themselves ." The new feature must be tested for two months before being deployed internationally.
Today, WhatsApp chat groups are still limited to 256 people. But now, communities overseas chinese in australia data will allow you to bring together several existing groups in the same place, such as parents of students from different classes in the same school, for example. Like a virtual bulletin board, only administrators will be able to send messages, which will be, like traditional messages, end-to-end encrypted.
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Moderating administrators
Communities will also be useful for businesses. “If a restaurant wants to create a group to share its menus or send promotions, they can do that ,” Sood noted, before specifying that Meta does not plan to “monetize” the communities.
In addition, WhatsApp will evolve discussion groups, the backbone of its operation:
Similar to the reaction palette on Facebook, users will now be able to reply to messages with emoji buttons;
the size of shared files will be extended to 2 GB and the maximum number of participants in a voice call increased to 32 people;
“Group administrators will be able to delete messages that are inappropriate or problematic for all members of the discussion ,” thus strengthening their role as moderators.
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These new possibilities, which will be deployed "in the coming weeks" , according to the press release, are reminiscent of Telegram channels, a Russian messaging service that allows messages to be broadcast to a wide audience, on publicly open channels or in private discussions requiring an invitation.