Today, Twitter has announced a live test of its new ‘Communities’ option, which will enable users to share tweets with selected groups of users in the app, as opposed to publicly broadcasting or sharing all of their tweets with all of their followers, all of the time.

 Twitter  appear to function very similarly to a direct message grCommunitiesoup with a few key differences. Each community will have its own feed that appears separately from the main timeline on the site, and for now, they’re invite-only, so administrators can control who can tweet to them. Only members of Communities can reply to or like other tweets posted to the group. However, anyone can click into a community feed and view every single tweet that’s been posted, as they’re public by default.

Twitter in its blog said that it wants to support public conversations and help users find communities that match their interests. Twitter wants to create a more intimate space for conversation. The community moderators are approved by Twitter and its members are required to follow the guidelines of Twitter for being in the group.

Communities are “self-moderated,” which is to say that deputized community moderators will have control over group membership and rules instead of being forced to rely solely on the same broken moderation process as the rest of Twitter. The first Communities available to join are broadly mundane topics like #AstroTwitter, #DogTwitter, #SkincareTwitter, and #SoleFood, though cryptocurrency is also on the list (of course). Twitter also shared a link where users can apply to form their own interest-based group.

While you can Tweet only to your Community for a focused conversation, Community pages and timelines are publicly available so anyone can read, Quote Tweet, and report Community Tweets.”

So Twitter communities are not private, meaning that anyone will be able to read your community discussions if they choose. All active communities are searchable in the app, and will also be accessible via a new ‘Communities’ tab at the bottom of the app on iOS (note: this was going to be the Spaces tab, seems that’s no longer the case), or in the sidebar on Twitter.com.

Twitter Communities

So it’s essentially public Facebook Groups, or Reddit subreddits within Twitter, facilitating more topic-based interaction, and community building around such, within the app.