X, formerly Twitter, is rolling out a new option to let users share their community posts with all followers. This is much like posting a message in a thread to the whole Slack channel.
An X engineer announced the feature through a post saying that it is available to users on iOS first and will be available on the web and Android soon. Users who want to broadcast a community post can check the “Also send to followers” option while posting in a community. The post will be visible to the poster’s profile as well.
Since communities on the platform are public, users can see the post. But, unless they are part of that community, they can’t reply to it. If users want to interact with a community post that was broadcast, they can quote it. It’s not clear if the social network will give communities any option of blocking broadcasts.
In the last few months, X has concentrated on making improvements to communities and adding new features to better compete with others like of Reddit and Facebook. The company has enabled the sorting of posts for pinned communities, a way to highlight your community on your profile the ability for private accounts to join communities.
In October, X rolled out a gatekeeping feature that allowed admins of restricted communities to have people answer some questions before joining. Based on the answers to those questions admins could allow them if they want to let people in.
Until now, X restricts community creation to Premium accounts. However, in October, the company opened up community creation to users in Japan. The social network has also been displaying posts from your joined communities to the algorithmic feed (“For You”) for the last few months.