X Communities to be discontinued in May: alternatives and how to migrate

Nikita Bier, X's head of product, has announced that the platform's Communities feature will be discontinued.

This article explains when Communities will be shut down and where users can move next.

Communities will be discontinued on May 30

On his X account, Nikita Bier, X's head of product, announced changes aimed at streamlining X Communities, including the following two updates:

The Community was initially scheduled to be shut down on May 6th, but due to backlash, it was postponed to May 30th.

• XChat will support invite links for group chats
• The Communities feature will be discontinued on May 30

XChat is X's new chat service intended to replace DMs, and the old DM system has already been integrated into XChat.

X Communities is a feature that lets users create public groups around specific topics. Community admins can set rules for the group and require approval for new members, but the feature is being discontinued because it is no longer used very much.

For those who want to move their members elsewhere, Bier said they should create an XChat group chat in the specific period and pin the invite link in their Community.

Users who run Communities need to prepare a destination early and let participants know as soon as possible.

There had already been signs that Communities was on the way out, including an earlier reduction in functionality.

By early April, users were no longer able to create new Communities, and some existing features had already become unavailable. I had previously predicted that X would eventually shut Communities down.

That prediction has now come true, and Communities is in fact being discontinued.

X is scaling back the Communities feature; new creation and some features are unavailable, and there is also a possibility of discontinuation

It has become clear that on X (Twitter), the Communities feature, which allows users to create groups for interacting around specific topics, no longer allows the creation of new Communities and has made some features unavailable. There has been no official announcement from X regarding this matter, but on X recently there have been a series of cases in which features became partially unavailable and were then completely discontinued, raising concerns that the Communities feature may be scaled back or discontinued.

April 9, 2026

Where can Communities users migrate?

Possible alternatives to Communities include the following.

1. XChat group chats

Bier recommends XChat group chats as the main destination for Communities users.

Community admins can create a group chat and an invite link, then pin that link in the Community to guide members into the chat.

XChat is essentially an upgraded version of the old DM system, with stronger security and additional convenience features.

X (Twitter) DMs integrated into XChat: What’s the difference between DMs and XChat?

When you open DMs on X (Twitter), you now see a screen that says [Welcome to the new XChat] along with a [Create a passcode] button. This article explains in detail what XChat is, why you need to set a passcode, and where the traditional DMs have gone.

December 16, 2025

That said, XChat group chats currently support only up to 350 participants. In response to the backlash, Bier has stated that the company will increase the limit on the number of participants in group chats to 500, and he has also indicated that they plans to increase it to 1,000 within a few weeks.

This article explains how to create a group chat and its invite link.

How to create group chats and invite links in X DMs (XChat)

XChat (formerly X DMs) lets you create group chats for conversations with multiple people, along with invite links for those chats. This article explains how to create a group chat in X Chat and generate an invite link for it.

April 23, 2026

2. Custom timelines

Bier also emphasized that X is continuing to invest in niche communities and pointed to Custom Timelines as part of that effort.

Custom Timelines is a newly introduced X feature that lets users pin timelines for specific topics to the Home tab.

It currently supports more than 75 topics, but for now it is only available as an early-access feature for X Premium users on iOS.

An Android version is said to be coming soon, but Custom Timelines are better suited to discovering discussion topics than to facilitating the kind of group-based, two-way interaction that Communities offered.

3. Lists

If you want to follow posts from specific people in one place, X Lists are also a good option.

Lists let you view only the posts from accounts you have added to a given list, and you can also pin a list timeline to the Home tab.

The feature is similar to Custom Timelines, but there is one key difference: Custom Timelines automatically collect posts on a given topic using Grok, while Lists show posts from the accounts in the list regardless of topic.

Here too, the use case is somewhat different from Communities, which were designed to let members interact collectively in one place.

4. Discord

External tools such as Discord are also an option.

That means giving up the advantage of staying entirely within X, but if your goal is to keep members together and enable two-way interaction within a group, Discord is a strong choice.

What Community admins should do

Community admins need to decide whether they want to keep their communities alive.

If they do not, they can simply wait for the Communities feature to be shut down.

If they do want to keep their communities going, they need to decide on a destination as soon as possible.

For example, even if you announce a migration destination the day before Communities are discontinued, not every member is likely to see that notice within a single day.

It is best to choose a destination as early as possible and announce it as soon as you can.

Conclusion

It is now clear that X Communities will be discontinued on May 30.

Community admins should decide on a migration destination promptly if needed and notify their members as soon as possible.

Changelog

• April 23, 2026, 1:50 PM (JST): Following backlash, Nikita Bier announced that the Community's closure would be postponed from May 6th to May 30th, and the maximum number of participants in group chats would be increased. Therefore, this article has been updated.