The Community Chats feature, which is similar to Discord channels or Twitter Spaces, will help people connect with their communities in real time around the topics they care about on both Facebook and Messenger via text, audio, and video. It will allow people to connect when, where, and how they want. In the coming weeks, Meta will start testing the ability for people to start Community Chats in Messenger, which will allow them to create a Facebook Group, start chats and audio channels, and invite others to join their new group all within the app. The company will also be expanding Community Chats to even more Facebook Groups. “Most people use feeds to discover content and use messaging for deeper connections. We’re building Community Chats as a new way to connect with people who share your interests. More than 1 billion people use Messenger to communicate with friends, and soon you’ll be able to start Community Chats from Messenger as well as Facebook Groups,” Zuckerberg wrote in a Facebook post. The capability comes with the role of Admins who can select from several options to help their communities connect. For instance, as an Admin, you can create a chat for group members around a specific topic, an event chat for an outing or meetup, a view-only broadcast chat for admins to announce group-wide updates, and an admin-only chat to collaborate with admins and moderators. Admins can also create audio channels so group members can share live commentary or receive real-time support or commentate on a particular topic or event. Participants also have the option to enable video once they are in the audio channel. Community Chats will come with moderation capabilities, which will give Admins greater control over their channels and also help manage them. “Given the more public nature of Community Chats, we’ve developed a robust suite of tools to help admins easily manage both chat and audio experiences,” Facebook wrote in a blog post. “Moderation capabilities like blocking, muting or suspending group members, and removing members or messages, as well as Admin Assist, which allows admins to set custom criteria that will automatically suspend users, remove reported messages, and stop messages from ineligible authors or containing violating content from being sent.” Other controls allow members of Community Chats to report messages to group admins or Meta, block users or leave a chat at any time. To know more about how to use Community Chats, check out the Facebook Community Blog. “We’re committed to building messaging experiences that help people connect with their communities, friends and families. As Community Chats rolls out to more people and groups around the world, we’ll continue exploring new features and capabilities to make it easier to connect with one another,” Facebook concluded. Community Chats are only accessible to members of a group and can be started from both Messenger and Facebook Groups. The feature will start testing now and will be rolled out globally in the coming weeks to more Facebook groups.
