Today’s announcement by Mark Zuckerberg that Meta is starting to test community chat for Facebook groups in Messenger does sound pretty confusing, so let’s unpack what we’re talking about here.
It’s probably easiest to think of community chat as Meta’s own interpretation of Discord. These will be available for Facebook groups and you will be able to join and participate in Facebook Messenger.
Quoting Ma’s Mouth, “With Community Chat, people can connect with their communities in real-time through text, audio and video around topics they care about on Facebook and Messenger Communicate. The experience seamlessly blends Messenger and Facebook Groups”, giving it a more immediate vibe – “Admins can now start discussing topics and get instant replies instead of waiting for people to comment on posts”.
People who create community chats can categorize them, so group members can easily find what interests them the most. As an admin, you can chat with group members around specific topics, active chats on the go or party, view-only broadcast chats to announce group-wide updates, and admin-only chats to collaborate with others as admins and moderators host. You can also make an audio channel, and participants can then choose to enable video when they enter the audio channel.
As of now, community chat is important only to be accessed by members of the group. Facebook is offering various moderation tools to ensure a good experience. The company clearly wants the live experience to entice people to use community chat, and if Discord’s success is to be believed, it might work.
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