Twitter has introduced Communities, a featured designed to help people connect around common interests.

Twitter has been experimenting with new ways to drive engagement. The company introduced Spaces, and has been expanding the feature to include Paid Spaces. The company also experimented with Fleets before killing that feature.

Communities is the latest feature, aimed at helping people to connect with like-minded users.

The company described the feature in a blog post:

Some conversations aren’t for everyone, just the people who want to talk about the thing you want to talk about. When you join a Community, you can Tweet directly to that group instead of to all your followers. Only members in the same Community are able to reply and join the conversation so it stays intimate and relevant. 

While you can Tweet only to your Community for a focused conversation, Community pages and timelines are publicly available so anyone can read, Quote Tweet, and report Community Tweets. We want to continue to support public conversation and help people find Communities that match their interests, while also creating a more intimate space for conversation.

Moderators will be able to set the rules and focus for a Community, and invite individuals who will add to the conversation. Twitter is currently limiting Community creation, but the feature will become more widely available in the coming months.