Meta Announces Community Chats For Messenger To Take On Discord

Meta has been rapidly expanding its service portfolio, including a new venture to take on Discord. CEO Mark Zuckerberg has announced the rollout of 'Community Chats', a new feature that'll arrive on Facebook Groups and Messenger. Similar to Discord, Meta Community Chats aims to make it easy to track conversations involving many people.

Meta Community Chats Announced

One of the primary features of Community Chats is organization. Users can organize chats into various categories like real-time discussions, audio channels, video chats, admin-only chats, event chats, and more.

"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," Meta explains in the blog post. So one might ask: What makes Community Chats different from your regular Facebook Groups?

The idea of Meta Community Chats is to expand beyond your real-life friend groups. You can join chats and communities based on your preferences and interest. The Meta blog post shows a suggestive community of Women Who Surf, a dedicated chat community for women who like such activities.

Meta Community Chats: What About Safety?

This brings us to a key factor of Community Chats - privacy and safety regulations. The new Meta Community Chats will involve users interacting with strangers. For the same, Meta will offer moderation tools like mute, block, or suspend to allow a healthy community conversation.

Meta also explained the 'Admin Assist' feature, where admins can customize criteria to automate moderation. For instance, admins can automatically ban members who use vulgar or abusive language on their community chat.

The new Community Chats feature is quite similar to Discord, especially when categorizing chats. Meta has been working on expanding its community-based chat features for a while now, and the new platform could promote healthy conversations.

Presently, Meta Community Chats is in testing and is expected to have a wider rollout in the coming weeks. As mentioned previously, Community Chats can be accessed on Messenger and Facebook Groups.

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