On September 14, 2022, Meta quietly released a new feature called Community Chats for use in Messenger and Facebook Groups. With this update, users of the Messenger app can set up new channels for live voice and video communication with one another.
Community Chats are currently in a beta testing phase, therefore only a select few users have access to them.
Facebook claims that “Community Chats effortlessly merges Facebook Groups with Messenger, providing a method to stay engaged with your group and establish deeper relationships.”
Community Chats is Messenger’s answer to popular social messaging apps like Slack and Discord, enabling group admins to build text, audio, and video channels, designate categories for discussion objectives, and have more focused, structured, and efficient real-time conversations.
From the Facebook App, Initiate a Group Chat by Doing the Following:
- The best way to add a Community Chat to a group is to go to your Feed, hit the menu symbol (three parallel lines), then tap Groups.
- In the Group’s upper-left corner, you’ll see a menu icon.
- Pick the Start a chat option. Tap Create a channel, then pick Chat if the Create chat option is hidden.
- Fill up the chat’s name, description, and type.
- Select the New button.
Furthermore, in order to initiate a Group Chat with the Messenger app:
- For other options, please use the menu button (3 horizontal lines stacked on top of each other)
- Pick a Group from the list on the left and touch on it to enter it.
- Pick the plus sign.
- Fill up the chat’s name, description, and type.
Please Be Aware that This Function Is only Accessible via Mobile at The Present Moment
Community Chats open up a wealth of possibilities for interaction and development for the administrators of Facebook and Messenger Groups. At least in principle, this is a positive development.
Whether or not people will use the new features is the pressing issue at hand.
Community Chats might be quite successful for Meta if it succeeds in attracting the conversations taking place on other platforms like Discord, Slack, etc. Especially now, when it’s losing ground to upstart competitors and has been the market leader for so long.
Meta’s efforts to transform Instagram into a rival to TikTok have not been very fruitful. If Groups and Messenger try to become Discord, it will be interesting to see how users react.
Community Chats have the potential to be the engagement win that Meta so urgently needs right now, but it remains to be seen if users would prefer to keep chat communities on separate platforms.