X is shutting down its Communities feature on May 6, 2026, citing overwhelming spam and minimal user engagement. The decision was announced on April 23, 2026, by X’s head of product Nikita Bier, who called the feature a “Temu version of subreddits.”
Launched in 2021 when the platform was still called Twitter, Communities were designed to let users connect around shared interests. Despite that goal, Bier said the feature was used by fewer than 0.4% of X’s users while accounting for 80% of spam reports, financial scams, and malware on the platform. He added that managing Communities consumed half the product team’s time in some weeks.
“Of the handful of Communities that succeeded, most were user-acquisition channels for Kick or compensated clipper communities,” Bier wrote on X. Rather than serving their original purpose, many Communities had become vehicles for driving paid traffic to outside creators — a practice known as clipping, where users share short clips of another creator’s content in exchange for compensation.
Community admins will be able to migrate their members to X’s group chat product, XChat, before a deadline of May 30, 2026. To accommodate the migration, XChat will support shareable “joinable” links for group chats, which can be pinned on X’s timeline and will support up to 500 members, with plans to reach 1,000 in the following weeks. XChat is also expected to launch as a standalone app.
Bier noted that X is not abandoning group-based interaction entirely. The company also launched Custom Timelines this week for Premium subscribers, allowing users to pin topical feeds to their Home tab that are personalized based on their engagement. Bier said the X team has been releasing two to three new features per week, a pace he described in March as a consistent rhythm.
Source: TechCrunch