Twitter begins testing new Spaces functionality for Twitter Communities

By Anita George Published October 12, 2022

Some fans of the bird app’s recently launched Twitter Communities could see added functionality to the service today as Twitter begins testing a new feature for it.

On Wednesday, Twitter announced via a co-tweet, that it would begin testing a feature called Community Spaces (a combination of Twitter Communities and Twitter Spaces, hence the co-tweet between the Twitter Communities and Spaces Twitter accounts).

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Communities 🤝 Spaces

starting today we’re rolling out the Community Spaces test where some admins + mods will be able to host Spaces in their Communities pic.twitter.com/gdlxR9IZiH

— Communities (@HiCommunities) October 12, 2022

Essentially, the experimental Community Spaces feature would allow Twitter Communities to host a Space (a live audio conversation hosted on Twitter) within a Community. The testing of the Community Spaces feature begins its rollout today and access to it is expected to be limited to some Communities moderators and admins in the U.S. The test is also limited to the Android and iOS mobile app versions of Twitter.

Twitter's Community Spaces feature on a mobile device. — Twitter

Interestingly, according to Twitter’s Help Center guide on the matter, Community Spaces can still be attended by Twitter users who are not a member of the Community that is hosting the Space. And according to the tweeted announcement, non-members can join a Space “but only members of that Community can reply to the Space.”

The Help Center guide also notes that while Community members can’t host a Space in their Community, they can still request to be a speaker within that Space.

If you’re not familiar, Twitter Communities is a service that allows Twitter users to create and join communities that are focused on specific interests and hobbies like cooking and fashion. They’re kind of like Facebook Groups, but are more similar in aesthetic to Reddit’s subreddits. For now, posts in Communities are largely tweets that may or may not contain images or videos.

If Community Spaces does well in testing and Twitter decides to make it a permanent feature for its Communities, then it seems like having that ability to host audio conversation events could help cultivate more active Communities on the bird app.

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Anita George has been writing for Digital Trends' Computing section since 2018. So for almost six years, Anita has written…

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