Twitter has launched Communities — a new interest-based feature that’s mostly similar to what you get with Facebook Groups and subreddits on Reddit. Instead of tweeting to your followers, Communities will let you tweet your thoughts and voice your opinions to a like-minded audience.
Twitter Communities Launched to Take on Facebook Groups
Twitter Communities are public, but there’s a catch. While you can view all the tweets in a Community, you will need an invite to participate in the discussion, at least for now. A member will get five invitations to invite more participants.
Each Twitter Community will have a single admin and multiple moderators. As you would expect, the roles of a moderator include inviting and managing members, managing tweets, and generating discussion. If you are interested, you can reach out to a Community admin to become a moderator.
Tweets you post in a Community will not appear on your profile. Moreover, your followers will not see your Community tweets in their Twitter feed. Members of the Community will receive your tweets in their feed and can browse them within the Community. Some communities that are currently live include AstroTwitter, SoleFood, and Climate & Weather. If you wish to setup a community of your own, fill this form to create a new Community.
You will see a new Community tab on Twitter for iOS and web once you have joined a Community. The feature is currently available as a read-only version on Android. However, Twitter promises to make Communities fully functional on Android soon.
The launch of Twitter Communities comes just after the company started testing edge-to-edge timeline design on iOS devices. Although Communities are public, it will be interesting to see how the company manages to curb hate speech and misinformation.
