Facebook Groups now supports 250-person chats

If you were an Internet user in the late '90s to early '00s, there's a good chance that you spent your evenings logged in to chat rooms or services like IRC (Internet Relay Chat), talking to hundreds of strangers about...well, anything at all. 

You may long for those heady days of chatting with strangers for hours on end, and if you do, you'll be pleased know that Facebook is now rolling out large-scale group chats for Facebook Groups, with up to 250 people able to talk at one time. 

This means that you'll no longer have to rely on posting in the group itself to start conversations with other members, instead you'll be able to chat in real-time.

Don't @ me

Not only that, if you're a member of a Facebook Group, you'll also have the ability to video chat with up to 50 members at once, making it even easier to build relationships with people who share similar interests. 

Although these updates to Facebook Groups aren't available for everyone just yet, they should roll out over the next few weeks - so get ready for a lot of notifications.

If you're already exhausted by the thought of you're phone constantly vibrating, fear not - you'll be able to disable notifications for these chats, as well as opting to only be notified if someone tags you directly in a message with the '@' symbol. 

Furthermore, Group admins will have another layer of control for these large-scale chats, with the ability to terminate spammy chats and the option to only allow admins to create them. 

Via Ubergizmo

Olivia Tambini

Olivia was previously TechRadar's Senior Editor - Home Entertainment, covering everything from headphones to TVs. Based in London, she's a popular music graduate who worked in the music industry before finding her calling in journalism. She's previously been interviewed on BBC Radio 5 Live on the subject of multi-room audio, chaired panel discussions on diversity in music festival lineups, and her bylines include T3, Stereoboard, What to Watch, Top Ten Reviews, Creative Bloq, and Croco Magazine. Olivia now has a career in PR.