Meta announced Discord-like ‘Community Chats’ for Messenger and Facebook groups. Large Facebook Messenger groups can now organise chats into categories — real-time audio and video channels, and admin-only chats for announcement and events.

Community Chats, introduced by Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg, is similar to Discord, an instant messaging platform designed for chats involving many people.

Community Chats is intended to extend real-life friends group. Zuckerberg said in a Facebook post that if, for instance, a woman likes the beach, then she might join “Women Who Surf”. As the prototype is based on open-group chat, Community Chats will roll out with moderation tools that allow admins to remove messages and block, mute or suspend group members over offensive behaviour. ‘Admin assist’ feature will allow admins to set custom criteria to control moderation. For example, if a user uses any abusive word then the admin can ban the individual.

Community Chats will be tested androlled out in the coming weeks.

Meta added the “@everyone” feature to Facebook Messenger, which sends a push-notification to everyone in the chat. Meta also brought the “/silent” command that sends a message without notifying the recipient.

comment COMMENT NOW