X Is Killing Communities: The Controversial Shutdown That Has Creators Up in Arms

X (formerly Twitter) has officially pulled the plug on one of its longest-running features: X Communities.

In an announcement from Head of Product Nikita Bier, the platform revealed that Communities — the public, interest-based group feeds launched back in 2021 — will be deprecated starting May 6, 2026, with a full shutdown and migration deadline now extended to May 30 after immediate backlash.

The reason? Brutal honesty from the product team: Communities were used by less than 0.4% of users, yet they generated 80% of spam reports, financial scams, and malware on the entire platform. Moderating them consumed massive engineering resources that Bier said could be better spent elsewhere.

Enter XChat: The New Home for Group Discussions

X Is Killing Communities: The Controversial Shutdown That Has Creators Up in Arms In place of Communities, X is pushing its revamped XChat messaging experience. The big new feature: public “joinable” links for group chats that anyone can share directly in the main feed.

Current group chat limit: 350 members;
Soon expanding to 500, then 1,000;
Links can be pinned inside existing Communities to help admins migrate their members before the May 30 cutoff

X insists it’s not abandoning the idea of niche communities entirely. The company says it will continue supporting topic-based discussion through other tools, such as Custom Timelines and improved group chat functionality.

Admins are being told to pin their XChat link now and start moving people over.

The Creator Backlash Is Loud — and High-Profile

The reaction from the creator community has been swift and overwhelmingly negative.

Streaming megastars including IShowSpeed (whose Speed Gang Community had over 152,000 members), xQc, KSI, and others publicly slammed the decision.

Their main concerns:

Group chats are far harder to moderate than structured Communities;
Bots and spam will flood in almost immediately;
The 350-person limit is laughably small for large, loyal audiences;
Losing the dedicated feed format kills the “vibe” and discoverability that made Communities valuable.

Former FaZe Clan creator JasonTheWeen went further, openly encouraging his audience to migrate to his Twitch community instead.

These aren’t random complainers — they’re creators with millions of highly engaged followers who treat X as a primary platform for fan interaction. When people like Speed and KSI speak out, the platform usually listens.

Will X Walk It Back?

The quick extension of the migration deadline from May 6 to May 30 already shows the company felt the heat.

X Is Killing Communities: The Controversial Shutdown That Has Creators Up in Arms Now the big question is whether X will:

Fully reverse the Communities shutdown, or;
Use the extra time to build a proper replacement feature that actually works for large-scale, moderated public groups.

Bier has acknowledged the feedback and said the team is “hearing you,” but so far there’s no indication of a full reversal.

The Bigger Picture

X Is Killing Communities: The Controversial Shutdown That Has Creators Up in Arms This move fits X’s broader pattern under Elon Musk: aggressively cut low-usage or high-maintenance features to focus engineering firepower on what matters most to the core product. But Communities were one of the few tools that gave creators a real sense of ownership and dedicated space for superfans.

Shutting them down risks alienating exactly the high-value, loyal audiences that drive engagement and retention. For many creators, Communities weren’t just a feature — they were a home.

Whether this becomes a rare X rollback or the final nail in the coffin for structured public groups remains to be seen. The next few weeks — and how the team handles the May 30 migration — will tell us a lot about where X’s product priorities truly lie.

One thing is clear: when your biggest creators start publicly telling their audiences to go elsewhere, you don’t have the luxury of ignoring them.