WhatsApp is adding a new Communities feature that will organize multiple groups into a single place without compromising on security and privacy of users.
WhatsApp is adding a Communities feature to the eponymous instant messaging platform, adding a social media aspect to it that will have all group conversations protected by end-to-end encryption. Unlike the new community feature on Twitter that brings together like-minded users, the core idea of Communities on WhatsApp is that it allows multiple groups to be aggregated into one super-group. But unlike social media platforms such as Facebook or Twitter, a WhatsApp Community won’t be openly discoverable. The phone numbers of users also won’t be publicly visible to all Community members. Only the admin and other members of a group can see them. Since the core purpose of a Community is to bring together Groups, there will also be the facility of sending broadcast messages to all Groups at once. The app will initially allow broadcast messages to reach several thousand users at once, but an increase in the number might happen down the road. WhatsApp is trying to keep the broadcast message noise to a minimum, which is why the company is also putting a cap on message forwarding. A forwarded message can only be pushed to one group at a time, instead of the existing limit of five conversations for personal chats.
