Meta is quietly rolling out a new “Communities” feature on Messenger, the company confirmed to TechCrunch.
The rollout comes as Meta introduced Communities on WhatsApp back in 2022.
They could create dedicated group chats for topics like upcoming events, security alerts, trash pickup schedules, and more.
Although the feature works similarly to Communities on WhatsApp, Meta says there is one key differentiator, which is the fact that Messenger Communities are connected to Facebook’s social graph.
On a help page, Meta says Communities on Messenger are designed for more public conversations when compared to Facebook groups.
Meta announced on Tuesday it’s rolling out the ability for Messenger users to create shared albums in chats, send photos in high-definition, and share larger files up to 100MB in size.
With these new features, Messenger is targeting people who tend to create shared albums or share HD images via services like Google Drive.
Now, users can create albums of photos and videos in group chats, whether it’s to organize photos of a recent spring break or grandma’s 80th birthday celebration.
The launch of the new feature follows Meta’s rollout of support for HD photos on WhatsApp back in September 2023.
The new features are rolling out on mobile to all Messenger users.
For the second time in just over a month, Meta’s apps including WhatsApp, and possibly Messenger and Instagram, are facing outages and intermittent issues.
WhatsApp also confirmed the outage in an update to its X account.
(In our own tests, Meta’s apps were loading and we could send messages via WhatsApp which indicates either the outages were not global in nature or they’ve already been fixed.)
This is not the first time Meta’s apps have seen a sizable outage this year.
At the time, Meta’s status page had signaled problems with products like Ads Manager as well.
Meta today is offering more details about how it plans to make its messaging apps, WhatsApp and Messenger, interoperable with third-party messaging services, as required by the new EU law, the Digital Markets Act (DMA).
In addition, Meta now says it will ask third parties to use the Signal protocol, though it may make exceptions to this in the future.
Meta’s messaging clients will download the encrypted media from the third-party messaging servers using a Meta proxy device, it notes.
But that solution will require third parties to agree to additional protections to keep Meta’s users safe from spam and scams.
In addition, Meta says that third-party providers will need to sign an agreement with Meta or WhatsApp before it will enable interoperability.
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