WhatsApp is adding tools so groups of users can come together en masse for private conversations. Called Communities, the feature will enable separate groups to unite under one conversational umbrella supervised by an administrator. Community members will be able to receive updates sent to the entire Community and easily organize smaller discussion groups on topics of specific interest. Rolling out in the coming weeks, Communities will contain powerful admin capabilities, including announcement messages sent to everyone as well as filtering controls that target subgroups. Communities will have the end-to-end encryption of all private WhatsApp conversations. 

“Since WhatsApp launched in 2009, we’ve been focused on how we can help people have the next best thing to an in-person conversation when they want to talk to an individual or a group of friends or family,” parent company Meta Platforms said in an announcement.

Calling the Communities expansion “a significant update” to WhatsApp, TechCrunch says the “groups aim to serve as a more feature-rich replacement for people’s larger group chats” with added tools. WhatsApp has had Communities functionality has under development for a while, intending it “to capitalize on the app’s existing end-to-end encryption as well as users’ growing desire to join private communities outside of larger social platforms, like Facebook.”

CNET says “Communities are WhatsApp’s answer to Telegram’s massive Groups and Channels, and while it’s unclear how many users can join a Community, they won’t be as much as the ‘hundreds of thousands of people’ in chats for other users, according to an official WhatsApp post.”

Communities will have “modern features that have been in rival messaging apps for awhile, like emoji reactions and expanding voice calls to 32 people, up from eight participants,” CNET writes, noting “users can share even bigger files and media now, with an expanded file size cap of 2GB, up from 100MB previously. And group admins will now be able to remove messages from everyone’s chats if, say, someone says something problematic.”

”WhatsApp will ‘start rolling this out slowly,’ Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg explained. “But he also noted,” writes CNET, “that community messaging (whether branded as Communities or otherwise) will be coming to Messenger, Facebook and Instagram at some point as well.”