X has just pulled the plug on its Circles feature

X (formerly Twitter) announced today that it would discontinue the Circles feature later this year. The company said on a support page that you won't be able to create new posts or add people to your Circle after October 31.

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. You will, however, be able to remove people from your Circle.

You can remove people from your Circle by going to their account page in unfollowing them. Once unfollowed, they will removed from your Circle and can no longer see your past Circle posts. To remain connected, you can follow those users again but they won't be added to your Circle.

Launched in August 2022, Twitter Circles let users create posts (then known as Tweets) for a selected audience. It gives users the flexibility to choose who can interact with their content on a post-by-post basis. They can pick whether to share a post with all of their followers or just the ones in their Circle.

Users can create Circles of up to 150 people whom they can add or remove at any point in time. A post or tweet shared with a Circle carries a green badge and can only be viewed by people who are part of it. However, users who are part of a Circle can not repost or share the post.

X (then Twitter) said at the time that Circles was a "highly-requested feature" available across Android, iOS, and the web. The feature received an "overwhelmingly positive" response during its testing phase.