X is bringing more attention to Communities, a feature that allows X users to connect and engage in discussions around a given topic, similar to how it’s done on Reddit. Today, tabs to access popular Communities are pinned to the top of the app’s homepage alongside your For You feed and other Lists. Now, you’ll be able to customize these individual timelines by what’s Trending, New, or Popular, or filter them to show only your posts and replies within the Community.
If sorting by popularity, you’ll now be able to sort popular posts by day, week, month, year or all-time — a set of options that mirrors those on Reddit, as well.
Previously, Communities’ posts could be sorted by Trending, Most Recent, and Most Liked, which offered similar views, but the feature lacked the granularity that’s now offered when sorting popular posts by a particular time frame.
Plus, a way to quickly see your own posts and replies wasn’t available in the prior version.
The changes are initially available to users in the updated iOS app, notes a post from an X engineer announcing the latest version of the Communities tabs feature.
The company is still working to bring the new functionality to the web and Android.
The product refresh is the latest in X’s broader efforts to revamp the Communities feature to make X more appealing to those who want more focused discussions. Last month, the company more deeply integrated Community posts across X, by making a user’s Community posts and replies visible to their followers and others on X. To boost adoption, X also made it possible for anyone to reply to a Community post.
X Communities aren’t just meant to be a way to attract more users to X. They could also potentially help the company with its AI efforts by creating topical discussion boards whose data can be shared with companies looking to train their AI models, in addition to helping train models at X owner Elon Musk’s AI company, xAI.
