X is shutting down its Communities feature

Source: Engadget

Announcement

X is closing its Communities feature in May, as announced by X Head of Product Nikita Bier. Communities were introduced before Twitter was acquired and rebranded by Elon Musk, and they allowed users to create, join, and moderate public groups focused on particular interests. While Communities let users follow a feed made up of only the people or subjects they care about, they never reached the scale the platform hoped for.

Why Communities are being retired

“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,” Bier said in a separate post. “It occupied half the team’s time some weeks, while the rest of the app suffered.”

While some real people used groups to organize around niche topics, the most active groups were “user‑acquisition channels for Kick or compensated clipper communities,” according to Bier—far from the feature’s intended purpose.

New product changes

1. XChat now supports joinable links for group chats.
   Create a public link and share it directly to the Timeline. With support for 350 members per chat (and growing), Groupchat Links are the fastest way to bring people together.

   — Nikita Bier (@nikitabier) April 22, 2026
   

Replacement features

X’s proposed replacement for Communities is the new XChat app, which currently hosts group chats of up to 350 people and will be expanded to support up to 1,000 participants in the future. Moderators can pin links in their Communities so members can join a group chat before the Communities feature is fully retired on May 30 (an extension from the previously proposed deadline of May 6).

While this keeps groups together, a live group chat differs from the asynchronous, separate‑timeline‑of‑posts experience that Communities offered. Group chats are typically active and demand immediate attention, unlike a separate feed.

To get a timeline of posts focused on an interest, users will now need to use X’s new custom timelines feature, which leverages Grok to automatically organize posts into topic‑focused feeds such as food, art, or photography.