Twitter is testing a new Communities feature

Your Twitter timeline is a window into the world as you want to see it. You decide who to follow and then your timeline fills up with whatever they are saying. You can choose to view their tweets chronologically or you can give Twitter the chance to try and algorithmically serve up what it thinks is most relevant for you. Twitter has announced that it currently testing adding a similar choice to how you view Twitter Communities too.

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Because of likes and retweets, when you follow someone on Twitter you are in fact signing up to see tweets not just from them but also, possibly, from the people they follow and even the people they follow too. Through these network effects, you get unofficial communities springing up, which is why you often hear people saying things like “Gaming Twitter can you help me with…” or “Lakers Twitter, how do you…”. As well as these unofficial Twitter communities, however, Twitter actually has an official Communities feature too.

Twitter Communities are created and managed by people, who moderate all community interactions. Anybody can see the tweets made by the community but only community members can engage with them and participate in community discussions. This is like a structured version of the bootstrapped community effects we all participate in when we follow another user.

This new update allows you to consume tweets from these official communities in the exact same way you consume regular tweets. It allows you to open a Twitter Community and then select whether to view the tweets made by the community in chronological order or in an order that Twitter algorithmically thinks is more relevant to you.

At the moment, this new feature is just a test so it will not be available to all users. This means it is still not certain that it will receive a wider rollout or if it will when we can expect it. To make sure you don’t miss any Twitter updates, stick with us for all the latest Twitter news.

Image via: Twitter