Everyone is curious about the WhatsApp Community feature. Many individuals are contrasting WhatsApp Communities with groups and wondering why the former is necessary.
WhatsApp Communities, for those who are unfamiliar, are a way to centrally manage communication among liked minded people. This means thousands of users can join a community with multiple subgroups, and all get the timely updates they need. The number of users, admin controls, privacy settings, and more are just a few differences between WhatsApp Communities and Groups. Let’s delve in and take a closer look.
WhatsApp groups
If you have been invited or added to a WhatsApp group, you can all participate in a single-threaded conversation. Furthermore, they can communicate through files, emojis, and documents. It has a large user base. Family, friends, social, neighbourhood watch, and other types of WhatsApp groups are a few examples.
WhatsApp Communities
The community feature was recently released, although WhatsApp groups have been around for a while. The community was created to consolidate all WhatsApp groups that shared a common interest. Consider it a roof over related organisations. In order to keep the WhatsApp family and friends groups all in one place. For instance, you can create a WhatsApp community. A lecturer can start a WhatsApp community and invite students from Year One through Year Four, or more. A reliable method of spreading the word about times sensitive or urgent information.
Communities can be added to groups, but not the other way around. To organise relevant WhatsApp groups, communities are employed. Consider it this way- a house (community) with several separate rooms (groups) where various conversations are taking place or workplace (community) with numerous divisions (teams).
WhatsApp communities are simply a collection of related or topical WhatsApp groups. In the same community, you can add your gym, your neighbourhood runners, and your diet groups. When you make an announcement or send out an alert to a certain group, only the members of that group will be notified. All the groups and their members will be notified when you send out an alert in a community.
Video and voice calling are not yet available in WhatsApp communities. Additionally, it doesn’t make sense to have video or audio calling buttons in the announcement groups because they can contain up to 5,000 people from the smaller discussion groups that are welcomed to the community.
A single community, however, can contain up to 21 groups. The sum of a community’s people equals 21,504.
If you’ve used WhatsApp groups for a while and are an admin in a couple of them, you know that if you leave a group as admin, the ownership and admin role are transferred to another user. However, a community is not like that at all. The community creator cannot leave or be removed as an admin in the new WhatsApp community feature.
All group members’ names, phone numbers, and profile pictures are visible to you if you are the group’s administrator or even a member. Communities, however, force members of disparate groups to interact with one another in ways that aren’t ideal.
Fortunately, unlike groups, community members do not have access to each other’s contact information or other personal information. While the community admin can still see all members’ names and phone numbers, the group admin can only see the profile details of the members of their own group.
