X's Head of Product, Nikita Bier, has revealed plans to terminate the Communities feature come May. Launched prior to Elon Musk's purchase and rebranding of Twitter, this tool enabled individuals to establish, participate in, and oversee public forums centered on specific hobbies. It allowed subscribers to track feeds tailored exclusively to preferred accounts or themes, though adoption fell short of the network's expectations.
Bier noted in another update that although Communities boasted an ambitious concept, engagement hovered below 0.4% of the user base, while accounting for 80% of complaints regarding spam, monetary fraud, and harmful software on the platform. The maintenance demands consumed up to 50% of the development team's efforts during certain periods, diverting resources from broader platform improvements. Bier acknowledged legitimate applications for specialized discussions among genuine participants, but highlighted that the busiest forums often served as recruitment outlets for Kick or paid content-sharing networks, straying from the original purpose.
As an alternative, X plans to integrate group functionality into its emerging XChat application, which presently supports conversations with as many as 350 participants and is slated for upgrades to accommodate up to 1,000 in due course, according to Bier. To ease the transition, administrators can now attach invitations to their forums, directing members to XChat groups ahead of the full decommissioning on May 30—a delay from the initial May 6 target.
This shift may help sustain community interactions, yet real-time messaging differs markedly from the non-simultaneous, dedicated post stream provided by Communities. Such chats require immediate engagement in a manner that curated feeds do not. For curated streams centered on particular subjects, subscribers must now rely on X's recently introduced personalized timeline option, powered by Grok AI to compile content into themed collections such as cuisine, visual arts, or imaging.