Social media platform X recently announced that it will officially offline its "Communities" function. This feature was originally designed to help users find like-minded people, gather around common interests and discover relevant content, but it was eventually forced to come to an end due to severe spam problems.
X product lead Nikita Bier confirmed the news in a post on the platform. He revealed that although users using the "community" function accounted for less than 0.4% of the total number of X users, the spam reports, financial fraud and malware complaints generated by this function accounted for 80% of the overall platform. "Some weeks this feature occupies half of the team's energy, and the development of other features is dragged down as a result." Bill said that X will shift its strategic focus to the company's new instant messaging platform XChat.
Bill further pointed out in the post that among the few successful community cases, most are just user diversion channels for the video platform Kick, or the operating positions of paid editing teams. "There are indeed a few very high-quality communities that will have to move, such as coin collecting, baseball card, skin care and art enthusiast groups, but this type of content deserves to exist in a timeline or chat channel, not a copycat Reddit." He said.
It is reported that the X "community" function will be officially closed on May 6, 2026, and the migration deadline for community administrators has been extended to May 30. Administrators can choose to migrate the community to XChat or other platforms such as Discord.
In order to accept users from the "community" function, X simultaneously announced a series of new developments in XChat. XChat currently supports joinable links for group chats, and administrators can create and share links directly on their personal timelines. At this stage, XChat groups can accommodate up to 500 members at a time, and the platform plans to increase the upper limit to 1,000 members in the next few weeks. In addition, a standalone XChat application is also under development.
However, the collapse of the "community" function reflects X's long-term dilemma in content ecological governance. The proliferation of spam and fraudulent content eventually overwhelmed this feature, and whether XChat can escape the same fate is still unknown.