Launched in 2021, when the corporation 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 superb, saying it was overrun with spam and a headache to manage.

Plus, noted X’s head of product Nikita 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.”

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.…

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.) This also touches on aspects of Android.

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, note that there were a few favorable communities in the mix that will have to migrate elsewhere, but largely suggested that the feature wasn, on the other hand’t worth maintaining given its overall low adopt.

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Communities on X will be shut down on May 6, 2026. Community admins can migrate their members to the newly revamped group chat experience. (The organization extended the migration deadline to May 30.)

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 500 members and will aim to reach 1,000 in the next couple of weeks.

Despite these changes, Bier pointed out that X isn’t giving up on communities; the business will just take a different approach.

Besides the expanded group chats, the organization 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 updated features like Cashtags, mute buttons for topics, voice notes in chat, a fresh photo editor, automatic translations, fresh reply settings, and the updated custom timelines.

As Bier noted in March, the X team has begun to hit a rhythm of launching two to three net updated features per week, meaning there are likely more features still to come.

Updated to reference the recent migration deadline and updated group chat limits.

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