X Announces Shutdown of Communities Feature, Focusing Entirely on XChat
Social media platform X recently announced the official discontinuation of its "Communities" feature. Originally intended to help users find like-minded individuals and discover relevant content, the feature was ultimately shut down due to severe spam issues.
X product lead Nikita Bier confirmed the news in a post on the platform. He revealed that despite the fact that users of the "Communities" feature accounted for less than 0.4% of X's total user base, spam reports, financial scams, and malware complaints generated by the feature accounted for 80% of the platform's overall complaints. "Some weeks this feature took up half the team's effort, holding back work on other features," Bier said, adding that X will shift its strategic focus to the company's new instant messaging platform, XChat.
Bier further pointed out in the post that in the few successful community cases, most were simply channels for directing users from the video platform Kick, or operational bases for paid editing teams. "There are indeed a few very high-quality communities that will have to migrate, such as coin collectors, baseball card enthusiasts, skincare and art lovers, but this type of content should exist in timelines or chat channels, not a knock-off Reddit," he said.
It is reported that X's "Communities" feature will officially close on May 6, 2026, and the migration deadline for community administrators will be extended to May 30. Administrators can choose to migrate their communities to XChat or to other platforms such as Discord.
To accommodate users from the "Communities" feature, X simultaneously announced a series of new developments for XChat. XChat currently supports joinable links for group chats, allowing administrators to create and share links directly on their personal timelines. Currently, XChat groups can accommodate a maximum of 500 members per session, and the platform plans to increase the limit to 1000 people in the coming weeks. In addition, a standalone XChat application is also under development.
However, the failure of the "Communities" feature reflects X's long-term dilemma in content ecosystem governance. The rampant spread of spam and fraudulent content ultimately overwhelmed the feature, and whether XChat can escape the same fate remains to be seen.