X has rolled out its latest update for Communities, providing you with more options to sort posts within a community feed, which could encourage more active, topical engagement.
As outlined by X engineer Dong Wook Chung, X has added several new feed sorting options within the community display, so you can arrange group posts by trending and popularity (Likes), along with chronological sorting options.
As you can see in these example screens, you can also drill down to only your own posts and replies within that community, while you can also now sort posts by popularity over variable time frames.
Which could make it easier to find the latest trending discussion within each, or get an understanding of what gains the most traction and interest in that group.
In this sense, the new sorting options are more like Reddit, giving you more ways to interact with different elements of the community, or get a better handle on each group.
And with all X groups now effectively public, that could assist in broader discovery, with users searching for relevant content in the app now able to also uncover communities’ posts. And when you do, you’ll now additionally be able to get a better rundown of what that community is all about, which could see more people joining in.
It’s difficult to tell how much communities are contributing to X’s overall engagement, because while X has sought to make them more of a focus, and has repeatedly noted that communities are seeing more usage over time, it also recently removed the communities tab from the bottom of the app navigation panel, replacing it with a dedicated video tab instead.
That could suggest that communities aren’t a key driver of engagement, but then again, I doubt that Grok is a key usage element for most users either, and it’s got it tabs and buttons all over the app.
Last March, X did report that time spent in communities had grown +600% year-over-year, with around 650,000 community posts being created daily.
That seems like a lot, but it still feels like a more niche element, which X seems to want to make into a bigger deal, so it has more specialized, focused comments on dedicated topics.
Maybe it is, and certainly, if those numbers have held, that is a lot of activity, with over a fifth of the app’s users engaging in communities daily. And again, with the recent switch that will see communities posts made eligible for search and discovery, this could be a useful update.
