X is discontinuing its Communities feature in May, as confirmed by Head of Product Nikita Bier. The Communities function was designed to allow users to create, join, and moderate public interest groups but failed to gain widespread adoption.
Usage of Communities remained under 0.4% of total users, despite their initial potential, leading to excessive spam reports and misuse. Bier stated, “Communities had a great vision, but they were used by less than 0.4% of users — yet contributed to 80% of spam reports, financial scams, and malware on X.” He noted that managing these groups occupied a significant amount of the team’s time, detracting from overall app development.
The feature emerged prior to Elon Musk’s acquisition of Twitter and was seen as an attempt to replicate the success of Reddit’s community structure. However, the most engaged communities often served unintended purposes, acting as “user-acquisition channels for Kick or compensated clipper communities,” Bier clarified.
As part of the transition away from Communities, X announced the launch of new product features. The XChat application will now support joinable links for group chats, allowing users to create public links to share on their timelines. Currently, XChat can accommodate up to 350 participants per group chat, with future plans to escalate this limit to 1,000 members.
Moderators will have the capability to pin links in their Communities to facilitate member access to group chats prior to the official shutdown on May 30, an extension from the original May 6 deadline. The shift to live group chats represents a departure from the asynchronous experience that Communities provided.
In lieu of Communities, users will need to utilize X’s new custom timelines feature, which integrates Grok to curate feeds focused on specific topics such as food, art, or photography. The restructuring aims to streamline content organization as X adapts to user engagement trends.
