Meta’s latest Community Chats feature might take on Discord
Recently, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg has announced that the company will soon introduce a new feature to Messenger and Facebook Groups called Community Chats. Similar to Discord, it will allow large groups to divide and organise into several categories based on their interests.
Users will be able to join audio and video channels to discuss in real-time. Meta says the new feature will let users keep track of the conversations they are interested in groups with a large number of people. Scheduled to roll out in the coming weeks, the Community Chats feature will also let users create a Facebook Group, invite others and start audio and video chats.
Group admins will be able to start a new conversation on a particular choice and get a response in real-time time instead of waiting for users to leave a comment. Other options include the ability to set up event chats, view-only broadcast chats, announce group-wide updates and have admin-only chats.
Meta is also introducing a bunch of moderation capabilities such as blocking, muting, suspending and removing members of the group. Community chats can be started on both Facebook Groups and Messenger.
Earlier this year in March, Meta added some features to Messenger like @everyone command, which allows admins to send a notification to every user in the group similar to Discord. Then there is the /silent command that lets people quietly send a message without notifying anyone.
With Facebook Groups and Messenger having more than one billion users worldwide, it will be interesting to see how much of an impact Community Chats have on competitors like Discord.
