How to use Twitter (X) in 2026
Most guides to this platform describe features that no longer exist. Communities shut down in May 2026, DMs became Chat, and the home screen now has more than two tabs.
9 minute read
What changed, and what things are called now
The vocabulary moved first. Twitter is X, tweets are posts, retweets are reposts, and the app icon is a letter. The harder problem is that the product itself keeps changing faster than the guides describing it, so a lot of advice you will find is confidently wrong. Three things have shifted since most of those articles were written: Communities were announced for closure in April 2026 and shut down the following month, direct messages were replaced wholesale by an encrypted product called Chat, and the home screen gained a third kind of timeline built by Grok. If you learned this platform two years ago, roughly a third of what you know about its surfaces is out of date.
Set the profile up so a stranger knows what you do in three seconds
Almost everyone who ends up following you arrives from a single reply or repost, taps your name, and decides in one screen. That screen is your display name, handle, bio, header and pinned post, and nothing else. Put the thing you actually do in the display name rather than only in the bio, because the display name travels with every reply you write. Use the bio for a specific claim instead of a list of adjectives. Pin the post that best proves it, and replace it when something better comes along. If you are here for work, turn on the setting that lets anyone message you only after you have decided you want that; the default of everyone open is a spam magnet.
The home screen is not two tabs any more
For You is the ranked feed, mixing posts from accounts you follow with posts from accounts you do not. Following shows only accounts you follow, and hides a further switch inside its overflow menu for strict reverse-chronological order, which many people report gets reset back for them more often than they would like. The third option is new: X launched Grok-built Custom Timelines in April 2026, covering more than seventy-five topics that you can pin next to For You, initially in early access for Premium subscribers on iOS. TechCrunch's hands-on found them genuinely topic-shaped rather than a reskinned For You. If you use X for research rather than scrolling, pinning two or three topics is the single biggest quality-of-life change available.
Posting: limits, threads, and what a thread is actually for
A free account gets 280 characters and about two minutes twenty of video. A Premium subscription raises the text limit to 25,000 characters and video to multi-hour uploads, and unlocks editing a post after publishing. That difference changes what the platform is for you: without Premium you are writing headlines, with it you can write essays in the timeline. Threads exist because a single argument rarely fits in 280 characters, not because length is rewarded. The useful discipline is that each post in a thread should survive being screenshotted alone, since that is how most of them travel. If a thread only makes sense read top to bottom in order, it will underperform a single well-made post.
Replies are the growth mechanism, and this is not folklore
New accounts get almost nothing from posting into a void, and a great deal from replying well to accounts their intended audience already reads. This is one of the rare cases where you can check the received wisdom against the source: X publishes the code that scores posts for the For You feed, and in it a predicted reply is worth several times a predicted like, while a repost is worth roughly twice one. Replies also put your display name in front of an established audience at zero cost, which posting does not. The practical version is unglamorous — pick fifteen to thirty accounts your readers already follow, and reply with something that stands on its own rather than agreement. The companion piece on the algorithm covers why the weights sit where they do.
Communities closed; group chats and lists are what remain
This is the change most guides have not caught up with. X product lead Nikita Bier announced on 22 April 2026 that Communities would be shut down, initially on 6 May and then extended to 30 May after moderators pushed back. The stated reasoning was that Communities were used by under 0.4 percent of accounts while generating around 80 percent of spam, scam and malware reports. The replacement is group chats inside Chat, with public join links you can post to your timeline, capped at 350 members and slated to rise to 500 and then 1,000 — which is no help at all to communities that had a hundred thousand members. Lists, meanwhile, still work and are still underused; a private list of forty accounts is a better feed than any tab.
Chat and Spaces: the parts that are not the timeline
Direct messages as they existed were switched off in November 2025 and replaced by Chat, which added end-to-end encryption, voice and video calls, file sharing, editable and deletable messages, and disappearing conversations. Old threads carried over. A standalone Chat app followed in April 2026, and group chats are now where the Communities use case has been pushed. Spaces, the live audio product, is still there and still works, with hosting done from the mobile apps and replays available for a limited window afterwards. For most creators Spaces is a scheduling problem rather than a growth channel: it produces good raw material and very little reach on its own, so treat the recording as the asset and the live event as the excuse to make it.
FAQ
Is Twitter still called Twitter?
Officially it is X, and the in-app vocabulary changed with it: tweets are posts and retweets are reposts. Most people still say Twitter in conversation and both names still turn up in search, so the two are used interchangeably. The only place it matters is documentation, where X's own help pages use the new names exclusively.
What happened to X Communities?
X product lead Nikita Bier announced on 22 April 2026 that Communities were being shut down, first on 6 May and then extended to 30 May after moderator objections. X said under 0.4 percent of accounts used them while they accounted for roughly 80 percent of spam, scam and malware reports. Group chats inside Chat, with public join links, are the stated replacement.
Is X Premium worth paying for?
It depends on whether you need the length or the payouts. Basic already lifts the 280-character limit and the video ceiling, which is the substantive change for most people. Premium is required to be eligible for Original Content Rewards, so if monetisation is the goal it is not optional. Premium+ mainly buys the removal of ads plus Articles and Radar.
How do you actually grow an account on X?
Replying to accounts your intended audience already reads does more for a new account than posting does, because it borrows an existing audience and because X's published ranking code weights a predicted reply well above a predicted like. Post consistently, keep each post able to stand alone, and treat threads as a format for arguments that genuinely need the length.
Sources
- About X Premium · X
- X is finally rolling out Chat, its DM replacement with encryption and video calling · Engadget
- X Is Shutting Down Communities, And Creators Aren't Happy About It · Talk Android
- Hands on with X's new AI-powered custom feeds · TechCrunch
- X Overhauls Creator Payouts with Focus on Original Content Over Engagement Farming · Android Headlines
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