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WhatsApp

has announced the

Communities

, a new section in the messaging application that will bring together in one place the conversation groups that revolve around a theme or a common social space, such as the children's school or the activities of the associations of the community. neighborhood.

WhatsApp Communities are a new space in the messaging application where users can

organize conversations by common themes

, with the aim of locating the most important messages and spreading the latest news.

Each community has its own name, for example, that of the children's school.

It is identified with other elements such as a background image, a profile image, and a description.

Below the profile picture is the number of groups (group chats) that have been linked.

The

administrator

is responsible for creating and managing the community, choosing the groups that will form it, by creating new ones or incorporating existing ones.

This person will have control over the chats, the participants and the content that is shared.

This would translate, for example, into a community created in a school and managed by the director or person in charge of it.

Here you can share the most important updates with all parents, while separate groups can be created for specific classes, extracurricular activities or volunteer needs.

Controls and privacy

Users can determine

who can invite them to join a community

, a control that already exists for group chats.

And they will have tools to report

abusive content

, block accounts or leave the communities themselves.

Although the groups will allow

conversations of interest to

be held between the members, the administrators will also be able to carry out mass communications by sending messages to all the community participants.

From WhatsApp they have highlighted the private nature of these communities.

For this reason,

it will not be possible to search or discover new communities

, and there are also limitations to forwarding messages.

That is, messages that have already been forwarded can only be forwarded to one group at a time, instead of five, which is the current forwarding limit.

And they have stressed that the conversations are protected with end-to-end encryption, so that only members of the respective groups have access to their content.

As an additional measure, the phone number of the participants will be hidden from the general community, although it will be visible to the administrator and members of the group chat.

The communities have been announced now, but their arrival will be slow.

The company has clarified in a meeting with the press, attended by Europa Press, that they continue to work and test this new function, and that in the coming months it will be launched first in some countries in order to have it available globally later. .

What's new in the groups

Along with the announcement of the communities, WhatsApp has also announced

some news in the groups,

which in the coming weeks will incorporate the reactions to the messages.

They will also allow files of up to 2GB to be sent and received through chats, the maximum number of participants will be increased to 32 in voice calls and administrators will have a new tool to eliminate wrong or problematic messages.

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