If you went looking for your X Communities this year and found them missing, you did not break anything. X shut the feature down, with the retirement completed on May 30, 2026. Communities — public, interest-based groups with their own feeds, admins, and moderators — are no longer part of the platform. Here is what happened, and what has taken their place.
What Communities were
Launched in 2021, before the Twitter-to-X rebrand, Communities were X's answer to Reddit and Facebook Groups. Anyone with a public account could join an open Community, and some groups required admin approval. Posts shared to a Community appeared in that group's own timeline rather than on your profile, and admins and moderators set rules, pinned posts, and removed members. Creating a Community required an X Premium subscription, and admin accounts had to meet eligibility basics such as being public and at least six months old.
Why X pulled the plug
X's head of product, Nikita Bier, announced the closure in April 2026 and was blunt about the reasons. Communities were used by less than 0.4 percent of users, he said, yet generated around 80 percent of the platform's spam reports, financial scams, and malware complaints. Moderating them consumed, in his words, half the team's time some weeks. Many of the most active groups, he added, had become funnels for streamers and paid clip accounts rather than the hobbyist gathering places the feature was designed for.
The shutdown was originally set for May 6, then extended to May 30 after pushback, so moderators had time to move their members elsewhere.
The replacement: XChat group chats
X's chosen successor is group chat in XChat, its messaging app. Group chats now support joinable public links: a moderator can create a link, post it to the timeline, and let people tap straight in. When the change was announced, group chats supported 350 members, with X saying the cap would rise to 500 and then 1,000 to cover all but a handful of the old Communities.
The trade-off is real. A group chat is a live conversation that rewards people who are present, while a Community was a browsable feed you could catch up with on your own schedule. Small, active groups often find chat livelier; large, slow-burn groups mostly found it noisier.
For topic feeds, custom timelines and Lists
If what you actually loved about Communities was a feed of posts about one subject, X now points you to custom timelines, which use Grok to automatically assemble topic feeds — food, art, photography, and the like. The low-tech option still works too: build a List of the accounts you used to read in your favorite Community, pin it to your Home screen, and you have a focused timeline that nobody can shut down.
Communities never quite found their audience on a platform built for speed. Their members have scattered to chats, Lists, and topic feeds — and if your group made the move, it is the people, not the feature, that made it worth joining.