X will retire its Communities feature in May as part of an upcoming platform change, according to Nikita Bier. The little-used feature reportedly accounted for the vast majority of spam and scam reports on the platform.
The feature was launched before Elon Musk acquired and rebranded Twitter. It allowed users to create, join, and manage public groups built around shared interests, while giving members feeds focused only on content tied to those topics.
However, the feature failed to gain traction at the scale the social platform had hoped.
Explaining the decision in a separate post, Nikita Bier said Communities attracted fewer than 0.4% of users while driving 80% of spam reports, scam activity, and malware issues on X. He noted that supporting the feature required major engineering effort, at times taking up half of the team’s workload while the rest of the platform was neglected.
While some users used Communities to gather around niche interests, Nikita Bier said the most active groups had drifted from their original purpose. He said they were largely operating as user-acquisition channels for Kick or paid clipper communities.
X is presenting its new XChat as the replacement for Communities. Nikita Bier said the app currently supports group chats of up to 350 people, with plans to raise that limit to 1,000 users later.
For Communities that want to keep their groups together, moderators can pin links, allowing members to move into a group chat before the feature is fully shut down. The closure timeline has also been pushed back to May 30 from the earlier proposed date of May 6.
This change will feel pretty different for users. Live group chats don’t work the same way as Communities did, since they usually need people to join in right away instead of just scrolling through posts whenever they want.
Users who want topic-based timelines of posts will need to rely on X’s custom timelines feature, which uses the Grok system to automatically sort posts into feeds centered on interests such as food, art, or photography.
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