Meta has launched a new community chats feature for Facebook and Messenger. Initially, the company will test it with Messenger and later add it to Facebook Groups in the coming weeks. The feature lets users make a group of people to have text and voice conversations with a group of people.
According to Meta, Community Chats will allow people to connect more deeply with other people to have real-time conversations on different topics and in different formats such as text, audio, and video. Community Chats can be organized into different categories to help members find conversations easily.
There will be an option to start a group conversation on a specific topic, event chat, or view only broadcast chat for announcements. There will also be admin-only chats for discussions between admins and moderators in private. Members joining the audio channel will also have an option to enable video if they want.
“We’re building Community Chats as a new way to connect with people who share your interests,” Zuckerberg wrote in the announcement post. “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 confirmed that it will add powerful tools for admins to have moderation capabilities such as muting, blocking, removing a member, or suspending group members.
There will also be an option called Admin Assist that lets admins set custom filters to automatically remove reported messages, suspend users, and stop messages from ineligible members.
