This past February, during Twitter’s analyst day, Twitter announced a new product called communities. Communities are dedicated places to connect with others and get closer to topics you care about most. Today almost seven months following the communities announcement, Twitter is beginning to publicly pilot communities to a small group of initial test group participants on iOS and web. Android is available as a read-only version.

How can you join a community, you might ask? For now, communities are invite-only. Everyone who is interested in joining a particular community must be invited into the community by a moderator or another member. Once you become a community member, you will receive 5 invites to invite more members.

Once you become a member of a community, you will be able to tweet into it. Community tweets do not show up on your Twitter profile or home timeline.

Are you interested in creating a community on Twitter? During the pilot, Twitter is setting up communities on behalf of admins.

You can submit a request to start a community here.