WhatsApp is a popular messaging service for groups and individuals alike. The app’s developers recently upped the member limit for groups from 256 to 1,024 people. That, however, does not bode well for you, especially if you get a ton of notifications. Fewer large groups can be better than several smaller ones sometimes, but WhatsApp understands that you probably don’t want to hear from everyone, all the time, and tests muting bigger groups by default.

It doesn’t matter if you’re an active participant or not, because even if you’re a participant in a handful of large groups, your phone could end up buzzing incessantly from the flood of incoming messages. We often manually mute such groups indefinitely, but WhatsApp is now beta testing a way to automate the process.

WABetaInfo reports that beta version 2.22.23.9 of WhatsApp has a new feature where groups with over 256 participants are automatically muted by default. This applies to groups which you join after they cross the 256 member threshold. WhatsApp will also automatically mute groups after they welcome their 257th participant. You can, however, unmute the group manually if you choose to. It may be workable if the group is well-moderated, and if you’re hoping to join the conversation.

This change in the behavior of large groups is rolling out gradually, but only a few beta testers seem to have access to it for now. The feature is quite useful, and we expect it to be a part of the stable version of WhatsApp soon, although the messaging service hasn’t specified a timeline for that or acknowledged working on the feature at all just yet.

In the meantime, WhatsApp has started rolling out Communities, a new option that lets you drop related groups in one dedicated place within WhatsApp. This could be another factor keeping down the amount of irrelevant notifications, with people hopefully focusing on a single topic in each individual group only.