Community Chats for Facebook Groups are being tested in Messenger by Meta

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg made the announcement that Meta would begin testing Community Chats for Facebook Groups within Messenger. That may sound like a mouthful, so let’s break it down.

Community Chats can be thought of as Meta’s take on messaging apps like Discord. You’ll be able to access these using Facebook Messenger and use them with Facebook Groups.

To quote what the source says;

“with Community Chats, people can connect with their communities in real time around the topics they care about on both Facebook and Messenger via text, audio, and video. The experience seamlessly blends Messenger and Facebook Groups”, giving a more immediate vibe – “admins can now start a conversation about a topic and get in-the-moment responses instead of waiting for people to comment on a post”.

The Community Chat’s creator can assign topics to distinct subcategories, making it easy for group members to zero in on the discussions that pique their interest. An administrator can initiate a topic-specific chat for group members, an event-specific conversation for an outing or meetup, a view-only broadcast chat to communicate updates to the entire group, and a chat for administrators and moderators alone to coordinate efforts. Audio channels can also be created, and once someone are in an audio channel, they can choose to turn on the video if they want to.

So far, it has been strongly implied that Community Chats are restricted to the group’s members. In order to prevent a negative user experience, Facebook is providing a number of moderation options. The company is clearly banking on the immediacy of the experience to entice users to use Community Chats, and if Discord is any indication, that strategy could work.