Meta announced that it will soon start testing the ability to start Community Chats directly in Messenger and expand the chat experience to more Facebook Groups in the coming weeks.
With Community Chats, people can connect with their communities in real time around the topics they care about on both Facebook and Messenger via text, audio and video. Just like Discord, Community Chats would make it easier to keep track of conversations involving many people.
According to Meta CEO, Mark Zuckerberg on his Facebook page, “We’re building Community Chats as a new way to connect with people who share your interests. More than 1 billion people use Messenger to communicate with friends, and soon you’ll be able to start Community Chats from Messenger as well as Facebook Groups.”
Meta has provided tools for Group admins to manage the community chats. Group admins can organize chats into categories so group members can easily find what’s most interesting to them. They can start a chat for group members around a specific topic, an event chat for an outing or meetup, a view-only broadcast chat for admins to announce group-wide updates and an admin-only chat to collaborate with admins and moderators.
Admins can also create audio channels so group members can share live commentary or receive real-time support. They can also permanently delete any content in a community chat, remove a group member from a community chat and more.
WhatsApp launched a similar named feature “Communities” some months ago which enables people to bring together separate groups under one umbrella with a structure that works for them.
