Yesterday, Mark Zuckerberg announced “Community Chats”, a feature allowing large Messenger groups who are not necessarily friends to organize chats into categories, admin-only chats for announcements and event chats.
The feature includes Discord-style audio and video channels for real-time discussion, and is coming to Messenger and Facebook Groups in the coming weeks.
“We’re building Community Chats as a new way to connect with people who share your interests,” Zuckerberg wrote. “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.”
The product features enhanced moderation tools that allow admins to remove messages and block, mute or suspend group members, including “admin assist”, a feature which will allow admins to set custom criteria to automate moderation.
In March, Messenger and Facebook Groups also got the “@everyone” tag, a feature which sends a notification to all users in a chat. A /silent command was also introduced that sends a message without notifying the recipient at all.
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