X Shutting Down Communities Feature in May, Citing Low Usage and High Spam

Launched in 2021, when the company was still known as Twitter, Communities were meant to provide the social network's users with a place to connect with each other around shared interests. Now, X is shutting down the feature for good, saying it was overrun with spam and a headache to manage. Plus, noted X's head of product Nikitia Bier, hardly anyone was using them. "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 wrote on X, explaining the company's thinking behind the removal of the high-profile feature. "Of the handful of Communities that succeeded, most were user-acquisition channels for Kick or compensated clipper communities." In other words, Communities often weren't being used for their original purpose. Instead, they had become a place focused on driving (often paid) traffic to other online creators outside of X itself. (Clipping is the practice of sharing short clips of another creator's work or a brand's video, for which the clipper is compensated. Marketers and creators leverage these communities to generate interest in their original content.) Bier even scoffed at X's failed Communities project as a "Temu version of subreddits" — a reference to the groups found within the more popular interest-based social network, Reddit. He did, however, note that there were a few good communities in the mix that will have to migrate elsewhere, but largely suggested that the feature wasn't worth maintaining given its overall low use. Communities on X will be shut down on May 6, 2026. Until then, Community admins can migrate their members to the newly revamped group chat experience. To ready itself for the influx of X Community members, XChat — the app's messaging service, which is poised to launch as a standalone app — will support "joinable" links for group chats. These public links can be shared on X's timeline and pinned, and support up to 350 members per chat. The group chat may support even more members in the future, Bier suggested. Despite these changes, Bier pointed out that X isn't giving up on communities; the company will just take a different approach. In addition to the expanded group chats, the company this week launched Custom Timelines for its Premium subscribers, which allow users to pin different topical feeds to their Home tab. These feeds are also curated and personalized to the individual user, based on how they engage with X. X's product releases and updates have been hitting at a faster pace as of late, with X's plans for its XChat app and another for payments, plus new features like cashtags, mute buttons for topics, voice notes in chat, a new photo editor, automatic translations, new reply settings, and the new custom timelines.