The teams, referred to as “Communities,” permit admins so as to add as much as 5,000 folks, even when they’re not a part of the identical Fb group. Meta beforehand launched that characteristic in 2022, permitting Fb group admins to create Discord-like chatrooms for members. This new kind of chat, in the meantime, is open to anybody — customers might make one for his or her neighborhood, faculty, or an occasion, for instance.
Meta notes that creating Messenger “Communities” isn’t but accessible to everybody and that customers needs to be conscious there’s a special degree of privateness that they usually affiliate with private messages.
The gradual updates to Messenger carry it extra consistent with platforms like WhatsApp or Discord. In 2022, WhatsApp’s messaging capabilities additionally expanded, letting admins of teams talk with hundreds of individuals without delay as a substitute of the extra personal, direct conversations the platform was identified for.
Messaging has develop into a key focus for different Meta platforms like Instagram, too. Instagram head Adam Mosseri has stated that DMs account for a lot of the platform’s development and that younger folks particularly spend quite a lot of time messaging. Final yr, Instagram rolled out the power to ship mass updates by way of DMs — referred to as “channels” — in a characteristic much like Telegram. Creators can run their very own channel for followers and ship updates, bulletins, and extra. The corporate has additionally tried to make DMs extra interactive with issues like contests run by means of messages.