WhatsApp may be working in the Communities feature

There is evidence that The WhatsApp You may work in a community resource. XDA Developers first identified this possibility in October, but now WABetaInfo has come up with similar results.

According to WABetaInfo, the Communities feature appears to give group admins more power over groups. This includes the ability to create groups within groups, which can be similar to how channels are organized in Discord.

Administrators can invite new users through the community invite link and then start sending messages to other members. It’s hard to say what these chats might look like now, but WABetaInfo notes that they appear to be end-to-end encrypted.

It also appears that a subtle change in design will help differentiate forums from regular group chats. As WABetaInfo points out, the community icons will be squares with rounded corners, a format that WhatsApp mistakenly enabled (and then quickly disabled) in October. There is no information on when the communities will be officially launched.

When working on the Communities feature, WhatsApp may try to bridge the growing gap between it and other messaging apps like Telegram and Signal. Earlier this year, WhatsApp’s new privacy policy confused users about what it would share with parent company Facebook, leading to a mass exodus of these other apps. When WhatsApp crashed with Facebook’s entire network of apps last month, Telegram gained an impressive 70 million users.