Fewer than 0.4% of X users ever used Communities, but the feature generated 80% of the platform's spam reports, financial scams and malware. That imbalance was enough to end it.
X Head of Product Nikita Bier announced that the platform will shut down Communities on May 30. The feature, which predates Elon Musk's acquisition of Twitter, allowed users to create and join public groups organized around specific interests, each with its own moderated feed. It functioned similarly to Reddit's subreddit system.
The numbers told a grim story. Communities never reached meaningful scale, and the moderation burden was severe. "It occupied half the team's time some weeks, while the rest of the app suffered," Bier said. The most active groups, he added, were not the hobby and interest communities the feature was designed to foster. Instead, they were "user-acquisition channels for Kick or compensated clipper communities."
X's proposed replacement is XChat, a group chat app currently supporting up to 350 members per chat. Bier says that limit will eventually be raised to 1,000. Moderators of existing Communities can pin join links so members can migrate to group chats before the May 30 deadline, extended from an earlier cutoff of May 6.
The shift from Communities to XChat is not a straight substitution. Communities offered an asynchronous, feed-based experience. Users could scroll a dedicated timeline at their own pace. Group chats are immediate and persistent. They demand attention in a way a separate content feed does not.
For users who want a topic-focused content feed rather than a live chat, X is pointing them toward its custom timelines feature, which uses its Grok AI to automatically sort posts into feeds organized around subjects like food, art or photography. Whether that satisfies the users who built genuine communities around niche interests remains to be seen.
