Twitter introduces its version of Facebook Groups called Communities

Twitter has been getting some hard work done to update the social platform and give it a more modern look and feel. One of the latest tests involved adding support for edge-to-edge photos and videos, hoping to make your feed a more visually pleasing experience.

The newest feature Twitter is testing out is Communities—a take on Facebook Groups and Reddit. It gives users the ability to tweet directly to others that share the same particular interests as them.

Introducing Twitter Communities

Communities will bear some similarities with groups on Facebook and subreddits on Reddit, but in a way, they will also function in a fundamentally different manner. Much like its rivals, each Community will have a moderator to watch over it.

For the not so initiated, being a moderator means setting up rules for the Community and keeping an eye on who follows them and who breaks them. Moderators are also in charge of who gets to be in the Community. In other words, they are in control of who gets added and who gets removed.

The difference in the case of Twitter’s Communities is that you can only join one if you get invited in. “Communities are just invite-only for now, but we’re working on ways for people to discover and join Communities they want to be a part of,” the company stated in one of their comments on the new feature.

Twitter invited several users to create the first-ever official Communities on the platform: #DogTwitter, #SkincareTwitter, #AstroTwitter, and #SoleFood (which is a group for sneakerheads).

Is invite-only a restriction or exclusivity?

Currently, you need to first apply and get approved to create your Community. This is another differentiating factor between Reddit and Facebook, in that you first have to pass some unknown criteria from Twitter itself.

It is unclear, as of yet, whether this highly controlled approach from Twitter will continue in the long run. Since we are still at just the beginning of these changes to the social platform, the company probably wants to keep things under surveillance and minimize the effect of any unpredicted issues.

A big step forward would be when users can freely and more easily create and manage their Communities. There is also something to be said about the exclusivity and quality control of Twitter’s version of groups and subreddits. It can become the main differentiator from competitors.

The social media giant has been making a lot of changes to its platform in the past few months, some of which are Super Follows, the above-mentioned visual upgrades, and more.