X Launches Grok-Powered Custom Timelines as AI Reshapes Social Media Feeds

The social media platform X has rolled out a new feature that fundamentally changes how users navigate content on the app. Grok-powered Custom Timelines now allow Premium subscribers to pin curated feeds across more than 75 topic categories directly to their home tab. The company describes this as one of the most significant changes to the app to date.

Unlike traditional feed algorithms that rely on keyword matching or hashtag signals, this system uses xAI's Grok model to read and label every post by topic. The AI understands the content itself rather than just surface-level metadata. This distinction matters when you're actually scrolling through the feed — the difference between seeing posts that merely contain a word versus posts that genuinely discuss that subject.

Nikita Bier, head of product at X, noted the feeds perform best for topics users already engage with. The available categories span news, sport, technology, artificial intelligence, finance, and pop culture. The rollout is currently limited to iOS, with Android support planned for the near future.

According to TechCrunch's hands-on review, the feature arrives alongside the shutdown of X Communities. This is a notable pivot — Communities had been positioned as a key engagement opportunity just two years ago, with X reporting 600% year-over-year growth in time spent and 650,000 community posts created daily in March 2024.

Now, usage has declined enough that X is ending support for the feature altogether on May 6th. The company is encouraging users to migrate their communities to group chats within XChat, the platform's messaging service. It's a stark reversal from the trajectory that former X CEO Linda Yaccarino had championed during her tenure.

The Custom Timelines feature itself requires a Premium subscription — $8 per month or $84 annually. Users can pin up to 10 topics or lists to their home tab. To access the feature, scroll past your "For You" and "Following" feeds, then tap the plus sign to choose which custom timelines you want to pin. You can reorder your selected topics from the same screen.

Once pinned, you can tap on any of the feeds from your home tab across platforms to browse your pinned custom feeds. The initial topics are broad and fairly standard — high-level categories similar to sections you might find on news sites. These include Business & Finance, Sports, Technology, Politics, Stocks & Economy, News, Science, Movies & TV, Food & Drink, Art, Real Estate, Home & Garden, Beauty, Education, Gaming, and others.

Beyond broader categories, there are options for following specific sports including American football, baseball, basketball, boxing, soccer, golf, MMA & wrestling, racing & motorsports, rugby, snow sports, ice hockey, tennis, cricket, Formula 1, cycling, and the Olympics. Pop culture and tech topics also make up many of the available categories, with options for celebs, music, concerts, country music, dance, electronic music, fashion, pop, K-pop, J-pop, podcasts, hip-hop, and jazz.

Alongside the Technology category, you can also follow special interests like Artificial Intelligence and Cryptocurrency — two perennially popular topics on X. There are also categories for things that overlap with Elon Musk's various businesses and interests, like robotics, software development, space, and biotech. Other general categories include anime, digital art, photography, career, pets, design, marriage & family, shopping, and mental health.

Worth flagging: the initial set of news-related topics leads with the Iran conflict, crime, and elections at the top of suggestions. While this likely reflects current conversations taking place on X, it's also an example of how a product decision can influence what news people see. A cleaner solution might be to organize the dozens of news topics more intuitively.

Notably, the second position in each feed was filled by an advertisement. This suggests X just found a way to increase its ad inventory. That matters because X's ad business has reportedly been struggling since Musk's acquisition, with conflicting reports about whether things have improved. The feature essentially creates new ad slots for every topic a user pins.

The Verge reported that Bier said early access to the Grok-powered timeline is coming to Android users "very soon." Along with this update, Bier also announced that X is deprecating X Communities due to "declining usage." Even as X moves away from community-focused feeds, other platforms like Threads and Mastodon continue to embrace them.

Earlier this year, Grok caught the attention of lawmakers from around the globe after its AI-powered image generation tool undressed people on the platform, including minors. Teens sued xAI last month, accusing Musk and other leaders of launching Grok's "spicy" image mode while knowing it would produce AI-generated child sexual abuse material. This context matters when considering how much trust users should place in Grok's content curation.

X's custom timelines offer 75+ category options, but the value will depend on the accuracy of Grok's selection process. The feature could help break users out of their regular filter bubbles and get them interacting with a broader range of content and contributors. Or it could just create more echo chambers with better branding.

For TweetDeck mourners, this might sting. The social media dashboard, which let users organize their feed across topics and accounts, was rebranded as XPro in 2023 and moved behind the X Premium subscription. Giving X users the ability to organize their own timeline topics might also address the For You feed algorithm's lurch to the far right, though that remains to be seen.

The feature represents another attempt to monetize the platform while simultaneously trying to improve user experience. Whether the AI-powered curation actually delivers better content or just creates more ad inventory remains the real question. Users will have to pay to find out.

Artūras Malašauskas is an AI Systems Integrator with 20+ years of production-grade web engineering experience. He has designed, shipped, and scaled enterprise Python/PHP systems for logistics, SaaS, and public-sector clients. For the past year, he has focused exclusively on AI integrations: deploying open-source LLMs, building generative media pipelines (image, audio, video), and engineering multi-agent workflows for real production environments. His standard: reproducibility, security, cost-efficient inference—no vaporware. He documents and evaluates emerging AI tooling, separating verified capabilities from marketing noise. Technical editor at: muza-ai.eu, ai-verslas.lt, ai-naujinos.lt Connect on LinkedIn