If you have been part of any organization that operates on WhatsApp you can probably testify that 256 participant limit is a bit annoying one about this platform. It forces the management with loads of members to spread the resources thin, thus creating as well as managing multiple groups. Now it will be changed as Meta owned platform gets an update that will double participant limit on each of your group. WhatsApp has recently announced a series of new features arriving on the service. including expanding the group chat sizes. Now users will be able to add up to 512 people to a group. The feature is not widely available at the moment but it is slowly trickling to the users, It is still very far from 200,000 participants limit available on Telegram users through subgroups but still it is a welcoming step taken by them.
WhatsApp is also working on Communities which is another way of managing the group chats efficiently. A community will appear as new tab within the app. It will have many groups, letting the admins to send announcements as well as updates to all the participants in a single go. WhatsApp communities has been in the pipeline since last year but official announcement came last month. Aside from these in-progress features, WhatsApp has rolled out two new additions i.e. reactions and an increased file sharing size limit. Now you can send up to 2GB of files at once on WhatsApp which is a massive jump from the previous limit of 100MB. Reactions allow the users to respond directly to any message with six different emojis without crowding the chat with individual replies.