UPDATED 21:07 EST / SEPTEMBER 08 2021

APPS

Twitter is testing a ‘Communities’ feature for people who want to stick to one topic

Twitter Inc. announced today that it’s slowly rolling a feature called “Communities” that will allow users to form their own groups and focus on one topic.

In what has been a transformative time for Twitter, the company is now going the way of Facebook Inc. and its Groups feature and Reddit Inc.’s subreddits. The platform has been known as a hotspot of arguments and trolling for some years, something Twitter has been trying to fix of late. The idea here is that having communities on the platform might help that along.

“There’s always been a broad, weird and wonderful range of conversations on Twitter, but we haven’t done enough to help connect people who are into the same things,” Twitter said in a blog post. “And now, that’s changing.”

Communities works as you’d expect it to. People join one and when they post, they will only interact with members of that community on the given topic. The posts will be made public, though, but only for people to see. If they so choose, they can ask to join the community.

Much like Facebook’s Groups, the feature will be run by moderators who have total control over who joins and what happens to people who break the rules. This, of course, could get pretty heated on a platform that’s already on fire, although the first topics Twitter revealed were on things such as dogs, astrology and skin care — hardly blustery talking points. Right now the creation of new communities is limited, but that will soon change.

Once people are invited to one of the groups, they will then be able to send at most five invitations. Twitter said people chosen as moderators will be active in their community, as well as having to meet other criteria. In a separate blog post, Twitter took up a fair bit of space talking about moderation, something that will become a point of contention once communities get off the ground.

Photo: Edgar Moran/Unsplash

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