Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced in a blog this morning that "Community Chats" are coming to Messenger and Facebook Groups. The feature allows large Messenger groups to organize chats into categories, which include audio and video channels for real-time discussion, admin-only chats for announcements, and event chats. Like Discord, Community Chats are made to be easier to navigate fast-moving conversations involving a lot of people.

We're creating Community Chats as an alternative method of communication with those with whom you have common interests. More than 1 billion people use Messenger to communicate with friends, and soon you will be able to start community chats in Messenger as well as in Facebook Groups, said Zuckerberg.

These chats are, in nature, supposed to be bigger than your actual world of friends: if you are, for instance a woman into surfing, then you will find "Women Who Surf," a sample image created for this mock-up, that's for you to join. Given that people within the group will be more likely strangers to you, the product launches with features around moderation by which admins will have powers to delete a message or suspend and mute or even block from a group a user entirely. An "admin assist" feature will allow admins to set custom criteria to automate moderation. For instance, if you're operating a G-rated chat and don't want people to drop the f-bomb, you can automatically ban users who send messages with that word.

Community Chats can be started from both Messenger and Facebook Groups. The feature will start testing now and expand to groups in the coming weeks.

Meta has already started integrating some features of messenger, such as Slack or Discord. In March, Messenger added the "everyone" feature, which sends a message to all users in a chat. On the other hand, the /silent command sends a message without notifying the recipient at all.