X is shutting down Communities on May 30 and replacing them with Grok-powered Custom Timelines—personalized topic feeds that users can pin directly to their home tab. The new feature allows Premium iOS users to choose from over 75 topics, ranging from Formula 1 and K-pop to cryptocurrency and biotech.
How Grok-Powered Custom Timelines Work
Unlike keyword-based filtering, Grok reads and labels every post before deciding where it belongs. The result is a feed that becomes sharper the more a user engages with a topic. Head of product Nikita Bier called it "one of the biggest changes to X"—a claim that is hard to dispute given how static the home tab has been for years.
Comparison with Competitors
Custom feeds are not new—Bluesky and Threads have had them since 2023 and 2024 respectively. X is clearly catching up, but there is a practical upside to the late arrival: Grok's real-time post analysis goes deeper than what competitors currently offer. Users can pin up to 10 topics, reorder them as they like, and toggle between feeds from the home tab. A new Snooze Topics tool also lets users mute categories like politics or sports for 24 hours—useful during a slow news cycle or an exhausting news week.
Communities Shutdown and Migration
The Communities shutdown did not go smoothly at first. Creators pushed back hard on losing public forums, prompting X to extend the migration deadline from May 6 to May 30 and bump group chat limits from 350 to a planned 1,000 members. Every second slot in the custom feeds is an ad—X quietly expanded its ad inventory with this launch. Android support is coming soon. The Snooze Topics tool is already live for Premium subscribers on iOS and web.
Uncertain Future of Custom Timelines
Whether the custom timelines can fill the social void left by Communities is the bigger open question. Group chats and curated feeds serve quite different needs, and not everyone is convinced the trade-off is worth it.
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