By John Ikani
Twitter announced on Wednesday that it would be testing out a new feature called “Communities.”
Similar to Facebook Groups, Discord servers and Reddit subreddits, users who join a community can tweet specifically to others in that community as opposed to all of their followers, and the only people who can reply to community tweets will be other members of those communities.
Unlike Twitter’s competitors, however, all tweets within Communities will be visible to the public. This means that users outside of Communities will be able to read, quote tweet and report tweets within Twitter Communities.
In a blog post, Twitter said, “Some conversations aren’t for everyone, just the people who want to talk about the thing you want to talk about. When you join a community, you can Tweet directly to that group instead of to all your followers. Only members in the same Community are able to reply and join the conversation so it stays intimate and relevant”.
The first Twitter Communities being tested are focused on dogs, weather, sneakers, skincare, and astrology, the company said. Communities will have moderators who can invite other Twitter users into their groups.
Communities are publicly visible but people need to be invited by a moderator to join. The company said that community creation is also limited, but in the coming months more people will be able to create communities.
What you should know
As part of efforts geared towards expanding its user base, Twitter has rolled out a couple of new features this year, including subscription-based “super follows”, fleets that have since been discontinued, live audio chat rooms “Spaces” amongst others.
Twitter initially teased the release of the Community feature in February, along with Super Follows, which launched last week and allows Twitter users to charge people to gain access to additional content.
The tech giant said at the time that their goal is to expand to 315 million monetizable daily active users and reach $7.5 billion annual revenue by the end of 2023, according to CNBC.
