STARTING today, Malaysian WhatsApp users will get early access to the Communities feature ahead of the worldwide rollout. Communities will become available gradually over the next few weeks to everyone using WhatsApp in Malaysia.
With this feature, people can bring together separate WhatsApp groups under one umbrella, making it easier to share information and organise. Hopefully it will lead to less clutter as we all know WhatsApp groups can pile up very quickly, at work and at home.
To do this, Communities introduces new tools for group admins, including control over which groups can be included in a Community, and the option to start smaller discussion groups about topics that matter most to members.
Community admins can also send announcements to all members through an announcement group. And only admins can add members to a Community or send an invite link, and will have the ability to remove members where needed.
Because of the nature of a lot of these communications, Whatsapp promises privacy in Communities, protected by end-to-end encryption.
Many communities in Malaysia already use WhatsApp groups to communicate and organise themselves, including schools, volunteer organisations, neighbourhoods, and offices, both for work and fun. We all probably know some overager admins out there, hopefully they don’t go on a power trip with this feature.
Communities is the latest feature the popular chat app has rolled out in the past few months, with emoji reactions being the most noticeable, helping to cut down on the clutter that can pile up in chats.
Other features like admin delete, increase in file sharing sizes, larger voice calls, larger group size, and leaving groups silently, have more utility for the power users among us. – The Vibes, August 23, 2022
