X is shutting down Circles! Know what it means

X has announced that it is shutting down the Circles feature, the app’s equivalent of Instagram’s ‘Close Friends’. Know what it means.

X will remove the Circles feature on the app starting October 31. (AFP)

Just a year after rolling out Circles, a feature that lets you tweet or post selectively to only a select group of friends or colleagues without letting the whole world see it, X (formerly Twitter) has decided to shut it down. The Circles feature was initially in the test phase from May 2022 with a limited number of users on iOS, Android, and the web having access to it, and was rolled out to the public in August. And now, surprisingly, the Elon Musk-owned platform announced its decision to shut down Circles on Thursday. This latest move is part of the myriad of changes that the platform has gone through in the last few months, ranging from the removal of Twitter Blue and rebranding to X.

Know all about X's decision to shut down Circles.

X shuts down Circles

The Circles feature will not be available on X after October 31, 2023. In a blog post, X announced that “X is deprecating Circles as of Oct 31st, 2023. After this date, you will not be able to create new posts that are limited to your Circle, nor will you be able to add people to your Circle.”

However, X has announced that users will still be able to remove users from their Circles by unfollowing them. To do so, log in to your X account, go to the account that is in your Circles, and unfollow them. Those users will be removed from your Circles, and will not be able to see the past posts.

How Circles is different from Communities

Circles is different from Twitter Communities, which offers people a dedicated place to connect, share, and get closer to the discussions they care about most with anyone on Twitter. Twitter Circle is for sharing the Tweets you only want to share with the people you choose to see them.

Moreover, for now, it doesn't allow users to leave a Twitter Circle. In case you don't want to be part of the Twitter Circle, you will simply need to block the person or unfollow them. Also, you can't have more than one Twitter Circle.