Hi, I am going to try to convince some people to move to Delta Chat, but they expect to use Whatsapp communities. I do not know such feature (I have not ever used it, I use that app the least, just because of the job…), but seems related to managing multiple groups. I saw both apps have channels so I understand it is not the same. Does Delta Chat have communities implemented, or is it a possible feature?
Thanks!
Kind of embarrassed to point out that there are many FOSS advocates here who aren’t up to date on the nuance of all features of proprietary apps. Even for those who are, it is a bit vague for you to request an equivalent to WhatsApp communities without specifying which parts you actually need and why (otherwise we would need to clone the whole system that is surely out of scope). It’s even worse, as you seem to be forwarding a request from a third party, so it would be best if they could chime in. Just noting that you may receive further answers if you elaborated a bit and ideally link to a few websites that explain the concepts that interest you.
I’m embarrased too for asking for features I know due to apps I would prefer not know about, you may include me among the FOSS advocates fo sure (regarding the equivalent to, I wrote equivalent as I could having write similar, or even, having detected the Super-Groups discussion, I wouldn’t have mentioned ever this propietary app). As I told you, I knew about that the same as you, so I looked for through the Internet (put here the search engine you prefer) and I’ve found distinct webpages, particularly the one from the propietary app.
Regarding the specific features, the idea I have (from what I listened from the people I mentioned and from the features I found through the search I’ve just told above) would be what I mentioned in Spec Proposal: Super Groups - #26 by Iago
So these super groups, communities or whatever, with one or more moderators, would merge together the idea of multiple groups (with users not able to identify/talk each-other inter-groups) with channels (with moderators able to add distinct groups and moderators [or users too?] able to sending messages to all the groups)???
What I’ve understand is that, having as context an association with distinct working groups, there would be an IM group for each work group, and then, all those groups would be “collected” under a common, let’s call “Super-Group“, just to inform all members of the distinct groups. The first thing I thought when looking at DC features was that, well, this are channels. But, I ask, may a person, let’s assume member of distinct groups, include all of them (as groups) in a channel, so that all members of those groups would receive channels posts (not having to send it separately for every single group), and even (maybe through a setting), the distinct members of the groups couls also post to the channel (but without necessarily having to know who are the subscribed members, or just the group names, this wouldn’t be an issue for us).
Thank you!
DC has no communities, but you could use a profile as a kind of community.
having some sort of community feature in DC will fill a lot the gap for the lack of contact discovery so this is a feature that would benefit DC a lot
I think I wrote somewhere about how this feature could be implemented, using some special group type internally
I think it is better to implement it similar to telegram where you have a group that can have other groups inside, the member list of the parent group is the community members and new members can discover all the community members there, and also join the groups they are interested in, the parent group is used to send the current status of the sub-groups, so at all times community members can join any of the subgroups without needing someone to invite them, leaving the parent group is leaving the community
For organisations trying to leave whatsapp, this is a much requested feature.
Communities seems to groups together multiple conversations under one group. You only have to join the group in order to see all conversations in the group.
Some of these conversations are global for the group, others you have to join before you can see them.
I know it is only implemented in Whatsapp and now Facebook Messenger. The first open source app that adds this feature will surely become more popular.
Here’s a simple workaround.
The community manager should create a broadcast channel and list in its description an invite link for each group under the space with possibly a few words of description. As an alternative, the links could be listed in the single (and most recent, but to be edited) message of the channel that is also broadcast to each new joiner by recent client versions.
It could also be wrapped in a fancy webxdc holding the hierarchical tagged directory if the list grew to an enormous length for some reason, but that’s usually also out of scope for Delta Chat groups already.
New members only need to be invited to this main channel and then they can navigate to the group of interest