Goodbye, Fleets

Twitter has finally shut down Fleets, a way users had to share texts, photos, and videos that would disappear in 24 hours, because the tool wasn’t as widely used as the company anticipated. Fleets will no longer be available starting Aug. 3, Twitter said in a blog post on July 14, and the move clearly shows that Twitter is moving away from ephemeral content that rose in popularity after the arrival of Snapchat, followed by Facebook-owned Instagram introducing Stories in its apps. 

Twitter began testing Fleets back in March of last year. The company thought that it might be able to lure people who were hesitant about collecting their stray thoughts into the platform’s semi-permanent format with a “lower-pressure” kind of a tweet. Many major social platforms have some form of disappearing content, so it made sense that Twitter would give things a try too — but after eight months live, Twitter is killing the feature.

Like Instagram Stories, Fleets lived on top of the timeline, highlighted in their own dedicated space. As fleets phase-out, Spaces, Twitter’s Clubhouse-like audio rooms, will occupy the same slot in the app.

“Although we built Fleets to address some of the anxieties that hold people back from tweeting, Fleets are mostly used by people who are already tweeting to amplify their own tweets and talk directly with others,” Twitter said in the post.

Twitter introduced Fleets in 2020 and made them globally available in November of that year, and on Monday, some Twitter employees and users were bidding farewell to the feature. Paul Stamatiou, who led the design of Fleets, said the company wanted the new feature to be “raw and authentic” and “feel lighter than tweeting.” “We were testing a hypothesis and not everything goes as you plan,” he tweeted. 

In its blog post, Twitter said it learned through its rollout of Fleets that people enjoyed sharing media and that it planned to test a full-screen camera, text formatting options, and GIF stickers in the tweet composer. The company also said it would continue to highlight its audio chat tool Spaces at the top of the timeline.