Twitter has a new disappearing stories feature called Fleets

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Twitter might not be giving us an edit button any time soon, but we’ll soon be able to send disappearing messages, called Fleets, a la Snapchat. In simpler terms, stories. Yes, Twitter Stories.

Yay, I guess? It’s not like every other social media platform hasn’t copied this feature already; even YouTube has a Story feature now.

The feature is closer to an Instagram Story than your normal tweet format. You can Fleet (is that a verb? really?) a block of text, a GIF, an image, or even one of your own tweets. Fleets will live at the top of your timeline, and any replies to them will go to your inbox, not to your public timeline. It just sounds like another feature for abusers on the platform, who can flood users’ inboxes even if they have DMs set to locked. Maybe.

That thing you didn’t Tweet but wanted to but didn’t but got so close but then were like nah.

We have a place for that now—Fleets!

Rolling out to everyone starting today. pic.twitter.com/auQAHXZMfH

— Twitter (@Twitter) November 17, 2020

Twitter even has a bullshit reason for introducing it, removing the pressure around tweeting to make it easier for users to over-share. Wait, did I say over-share? I meant share. Yes, that’s what I meant. Anything to increase engagement, right @jack? Apparently, the top ten percent of Twitter users are responsible for 80 percent of the U.S. tweets; if feature parity is the only reason, how about that edit button?

It amuses me that Twitter named their short-lived feature Fleets, after “fleeting” thoughts. I mean, isn’t every tweet a fleeting thought, sent into the ether by a million bad-faith, bad-take actors? The average half-life of a tweet is mere seconds, so I’m not entirely sure what function putting self-destructing tweets onto the platform does for society, even if it’s to have feature parity with other platforms.

Do you plan on using Twitter Fleets? Have any thoughts on this? Let us know down below in the comments or carry the discussion over to our Twitter or Facebook.

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Joe Rice-Jones

Maker, meme-r, and unabashed geek with nearly half a decade of blogging experience at KnowTechie, SlashGear and XDA Developers. If it runs on electricity (or even if it doesn't), Joe probably has one around his office somewhere, with particular focus in gadgetry and handheld gaming. Shoot him an email at joe@knowtechie.com.