X (Twitter) is shutting down Communities on May 30th due to declining usage. Initially, the date was May 6th, but it has now been extended. Nikita Bier, who works on product at X, announced it on the platform, while also mentioning that XChat group chats now support public joinable links.
Anyone can create a link to their group chat and pin it directly on their timeline for people to join. The cap is currently 350 members per chat, with plans to grow the number to 500, and then 1,000 eventually. It seems to be the replacement for Communities.
There may be hope for big creators on X
Nikita’s replies section blew up with creators and community owners protesting the shutdown of Communities. Some expressed how the largest communities on X regularly house over 100,000 members with thousands active daily.
Even at 1,000 members, XChat covers only a tiny fraction of what Communities could handle, and it doesn't have the same functionality either. In particular, IShowSpeed, a hugely popular American YouTuber and streamer, showed off his “Speed Gang” community.
It has 155,000 members, and he personally disagrees with the decision because his Community is how he talks to his fanbase at scale.
Nikita responded by sliding into his DMs, along with a few other large creators, to try and work out a way to keep their specific communities intact. It's possible there may be exceptions for the biggest names in the coming days.
Another creator running a credit cards and finance community with 3,500 members asked how exactly 3,500 people are supposed to fit into a group chat with a 500 to 1,000 member cap.
Nikita's response was more dismissive, saying only 4 people had posted in the creator's community for the entire month of April, so a group chat would actually serve them better.
Communities wasn't generating organic traffic
In a separate post, Nikita has shared a candid explanation as to why Communities is being shut down. The headline stat is that the feature was used by less than 0.4% of X's users, yet was responsible for 80% of spam reports, financial scams, and malware on the platform.
Also, dealing with it was eating up half the product team's time for weeks, while the rest of the app was being neglected to manage it. He further points out that most of the active Communities weren't organic fan spaces, but they were largely being used as funnels to recruit audiences for Kick, a popular streaming platform.
Alternatively, they were run by paid clippers, people who get compensated to cut and share streamer content. In case you've never used it, X Communities was basically X's attempt at building something similar to Facebook Groups or subreddits.
The communities are dedicated spaces organized around a specific topic or interest where people could join and post exclusively within that community rather than to their general timeline. It gave fandoms, hobby groups, niche interests, and creator audiences a dedicated home on the platform.
Members could also discover other members. But as it seems, the model works really well on platforms like Reddit and Facebook where people are already in a browsing and discovery mindset. On X, the culture is faster and more chaotic where people come to post and scroll, and fewer people want to hang out in a dedicated space.
