WhatsApp rolls out Communities, doubles user limit on group chats

Meta is rolling out some new features to WhatsApp to make it even easier for large groups of people to use, while also launching the Communities feature worldwide.

The latter are designed to host multiple group chats that are related to each other, such as a company, an organization or even a school. It is quite reminiscent of the operating model of Slack and Discord, but messages are protected by end-to-end encryption and administrators have the ability to make general announcements that are seen simultaneously by all Communities of the wider group.

Other interesting and useful additions are in-chat polls, polls within group chats, the ability to make a group encrypted video call with up to 32 users, but also the doubling of the limit of users who can participate in a group from 512 to 1024.

The majority of WhatsApp's new features have rolled out to all users, but Communities are rolling out gradually and you may need to wait a few days and/or weeks.