Communities, Twitter’s take on subreddits, grow after global rollout

Twitter's new Communities feature lets you join a kind of forum dedicated to a certain topic and share your own tweets to like-minded people. — dpa

Our Twitter timelines are usually a hodgepodge of random topics from the various accounts we follow, but the social media company now wants to let users focus on one topic at a time, not unlike Reddit does with its subreddit forums.

Twitter’s new Communities feature, first introduced as a trial in late 2021, is now being rolled out internationally and these forum-like spaces are filling up with tens of thousands of like-minded people posting about niche topics like Thai food or photography.

Once you’re in a community, you can publish tweets for that specific community, meaning for example your latest Marvel Cinematic Universe fan theory only goes out to people in the Marvel fans community – and not all your followers.

While you can’t upvote or downvote tweets like you can do with posts on Reddit, you can like and comment on them as you would with normal tweets, so long as you are part of that community.

“Communities are started and managed by people on Twitter – admins and moderators who enforce community rules and keep conversations informative, relevant, and fun,” Twitter explains.

If you can’t find the item “Communities” in the menu under “Home” and “#Explore”, you first have to find and join an open community to activate the new feature.

For communities with an open membership, you just have to tap or click on the “Join” button at the top of each community page under the large community profile picture.

You’ll then see the Communities item on your menu and will be able to search for more from there.

You may also need a community invitation from the moderator or another member of the respective community. After that, you can post, like or comment as usual.

Community tweets do not appear in the “normal” home timelines of Twitter followers, but they remain partially public in the Community timeline.

All information on communities, including how to set up a slant group yourself and become an admin, can be found in the Twitter help section. – dpa