X, formerly Twitter, will shut down its Communities feature on May 30, as announced by Head of Product Nikita Bier. Users are encouraged to migrate to group chats in the XChat app, which supports up to 350 members and will expand further. The decision follows low usage and high association with spam and scams.
Nikita Bier, X's Head of Product, announced on April 22 that the platform is retiring its Communities feature, originally launched before Elon Musk acquired and rebranded Twitter as X. These groups allowed users to create, join and moderate public spaces focused on specific interests, providing a dedicated feed of related posts. However, Bier noted they attracted minimal engagement while generating significant issues. > 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. It occupied half the team's time some weeks, while the rest of the app suffered. Bier highlighted that the most active groups often served as recruitment channels for platforms like Kick or compensated clip-sharing communities, diverging from their intended purpose. To facilitate the transition, moderators can now pin join links for XChat group chats directly in their Communities pages. XChat currently handles groups of up to 350 members, with plans to increase that to 1,000. The retirement date has been extended to May 30 from an initial May 6 deadline. While group chats offer real-time interaction, they differ from the asynchronous feeds Communities provided. Users seeking topic-specific timelines can now use X's custom timelines feature, powered by Grok AI, for curated feeds on subjects like food, art or photography.
