Nikita Beer, head of product at X, announced that the platform will permanently shut down its "Communities" feature next May.
This feature was launched before Elon Musk acquired and renamed Twitter. It allows users to create, join, and moderate public groups, with each group focusing on a specific interest, allowing users to follow content limited to people or topics that interest them only.
Today we're announcing two product changes for organizing communities on X:
1. XChat now supports joinable links for groupchats. Create a public link & share direct to Timeline. With support for 350 members per chat (and growing), Groupchat Links are the fastest way to bring… pic.twitter.com/GNcRB99Opc
However, the feature did not achieve the level of use the platform had hoped for. In a separate post, Peer revealed that less than 0.4% of the platform's users had used this feature, yet it was responsible for 80% of spam, financial fraud, and malware reports on the X platform.
Beer added that the "Communities" feature was consuming half the team's time on some weeks, while the rest of the app suffered from neglect. Worse still, according to Beer, the most active "Groups" were not being used for their intended purposes, but rather had become "channels for attracting users to the Kik platform, or communities for posting paid videos," indicating unintended commercial uses.
As an alternative to the "Communities" feature, the X platform offers its new XChat application, which can currently host group chats for up to 350 people, with plans to expand it later to support group chats for up to 1,000 people.
Beer explained that administrators of existing "communities" can install links in their communities, enabling members to join a group conversation before the "communities" feature is completely shut down.
The previous deadline for the shutdown was May 6, but it was extended to May 30 to allow more time for users to switch to alternatives.
However, it's important to note that live group chats differ significantly from the original "Communities" experience. While the latter offered a separate, asynchronous timeline of posts, group chats demand immediate and continuous attention. Therefore, to obtain a timeline of posts focused on a specific interest (the closest experience to what "Communities" offered), users will now need to utilize X's new "Custom Timelines" feature. This feature uses the Grok AI model to automatically organize posts into timelines focused on specific topics such as food, art, or photography.
