X to shut down Communities feature in May

X has announced plans to close its Communities feature at the end of May, marking the end of a tool originally introduced before the platform’s acquisition and rebranding under Elon Musk. The feature allowed users to create and join public groups centred on specific interests, offering dedicated feeds that focused on particular topics or communities.

The decision was confirmed by X’s Head of Product, Nikita Bier, who said the feature had not reached the level of adoption the company expected. Communities were designed to help users connect with others who shared common interests and to follow content from those groups without interference from the broader platform timeline.

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

— Nikita Bier (@nikitabier) April 22, 2026

Although Communities enabled users to curate topic-specific feeds, the feature did not gain widespread traction among the platform’s user base. Instead, the company said it had become a disproportionate resource burden and posed safety concerns that required significant attention from development teams.

Low usage and high moderation costs

According to Bier, the feature struggled to achieve meaningful engagement levels despite its initial promise. He explained that Communities accounted for a very small share of the platform’s overall activity, while generating a disproportionately large volume of moderation 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,” Bier said in a separate post.

We're going to be investing heavily in XChat.

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.…

— Nikita Bier (@nikitabier) April 23, 2026

He added that maintaining the feature consumed a large portion of the team’s working time, leaving fewer resources available to support other parts of the platform. “It occupied half the team’s time some weeks, while the rest of the app suffered,” Bier noted.

While some users relied on Communities to organise discussions around niche interests, the company indicated that many of the most active groups were not functioning as originally intended. Bier said the busiest Communities often served as “user-acquisition channels for Kick or compensated clipper communities,” rather than spaces for organic discussion.

The company’s remarks suggest that misuse of the feature, along with low engagement levels, played a significant role in the decision to discontinue it. The move reflects a broader trend among social platforms to streamline features that fail to gain sufficient adoption or that create disproportionate moderation challenges.

Shift towards group chat functionality

In place of Communities, X plans to focus on expanding its group messaging capabilities through its newer XChat application. The company said this messaging-based approach will allow users to maintain group connections even after Communities are phased out.

Currently, XChat supports group conversations with up to 350 participants. According to Bier, the platform intends to expand this capacity to accommodate up to 1,000 participants in future updates.

Moderators have been given tools to help transition existing Communities to the new format. They can pin invitation links within their Communities pages, enabling members to join associated group chats before the feature is permanently removed.

The shutdown deadline has been set for 30 May, representing an extension from an earlier planned closure date of 6 May. This additional time is intended to allow group administrators to migrate their members and maintain continuity for ongoing discussions.

However, the transition from Communities to group chats represents a fundamental change in how users interact on the platform. Group chats typically involve real-time participation and constant updates, which can demand more attention from users than the slower, feed-based structure of Communities.

New tools to replace topic-focused feeds

Although group chats may help preserve social connections, they do not fully replicate the experience of following topic-specific timelines. Communities allowed users to browse posts at their own pace, focusing on content organised around a shared interest rather than real-time conversation.

To address this gap, X is promoting its new custom timelines feature as an alternative way to organise content. This tool uses the platform’s Grok technology to automatically group posts into themed feeds covering areas such as food, art and photography.

The company hopes that combining custom timelines with enhanced group chat capabilities will provide a more flexible and scalable framework for user interaction. Instead of relying on dedicated group spaces, users will be able to customise their browsing experience while staying connected through messaging tools.

The closure of Communities highlights the challenges social media companies face in balancing innovation with user adoption and safety requirements. Features that appear promising in concept may struggle to sustain long-term engagement, particularly if they introduce significant moderation risks or technical complexity.

For X, the shift towards chat-based interaction and automated content organisation suggests a broader strategic focus on real-time communication and algorithm-driven discovery. Whether these changes will improve user engagement remains to be seen, but the retirement of Communities marks a notable change in the platform’s approach to community building.