WhatsApp – Community: What is it and how is it different from the group?

• With Community, WhatsApp now offers a kind of meta groups.
• Messenger explains on Twitter how community and group differ.
• The developers also reveal when you should use which of the two agents.

It is probably the biggest innovation in WhatsApp for years: With the community update, Messenger is currently introducing a new function that allows you to combine several thematically related groups and manage them centrally in one place. You can reach the WhatsApp community area via a new icon in the main menu. The camera shortcut had to go for this.

But the new feature also causes discomfort. When is it enough to create a group and when is creating a community on WhatsApp the better choice? Many of you are asking yourself that at the moment. Messenger has now responded to this on Twitter and explained the differences again:

In the future, groups will be used in Messenger to exchange information with friends and family and to exchange information on a single topic – such as your birthday party. Communities, on the other hand, are intended for companies, organizations and institutions. For example, a school can create a WhatsApp community and set up a group for each class.

Teachers who teach in several classes can join the respective class groups and have central access to them in Messenger via the school community. In short: The community update has hardly any relevance for private communication. But it brings some conveniences to the traditional groups – such as the ability to vote in a WhatsApp chat.

Communities have other advantages over a traditional group. Each community has an announcement group in which admins can send relevant information directly to all contacts belonging to the community. Previously, you had to create a broadcast list for this. In addition, admins must first unlock new group members before they can join a group.

By the way, anyone who already uses WhatsApp in their company or organization does not have to start from scratch. Existing WhatsApp groups can be integrated into a community – provided you are the admin of the group. Incidentally, a community can have a maximum of 50 groups. Up to 5,000 contacts can be reached in the announcement group. Regular groups are limited to 1,023 contacts.

Also interesting…

While WhatsApp provides extensive information about the community update, other innovations are more hidden. A mysterious blue circle around some profile pictures has been causing frowns in the fan community for several weeks.

Also under the radar for many is this change to protect your privacy, which even results in restrictions on WhatsApp web and desktop.