Twitter announced the closure of Fleets , its Instagram-style story proposal, according to The Verge. The feature, which allows publications to be made with temporary visibility, was only released in November 2020. Less than a year later – 8 months, to be exact – the social network decided to say goodbye to it permanently. The reason? Clearly, the Fleets did not get the expected reception. Those led by Jack Dorsey expected a higher percentage of use and never got it.
“We were hoping that Fleets would help more people to feel comfortable joining the conversation on Twitter. But since we introduced Fleets to everyone, we have not seen an increase in the number of people joining these conversations as we expected,” he said. Ilya Brown, Vice President of Product at Twitter. Thus, Fleets will remain active until next August 3 .
Now, if you expected the Timeline of your Twitter mobile application to return to normal, you better forget about it. As the company commented, the Fleets section will be fully occupied by the Spaces , the public audio rooms. Unlike Fleets, it seems that Spaces are being used by users, perhaps due to the popularity they gained thanks to platforms such as Clubhouse.
Currently Spaces already appear in the same section dedicated to Fleets , although the former have priority to be placed in the first places. As of August 3, then, the audio rooms will be the only protagonists in this section of the interface.
Fleets, a proposal that nobody asked for
In recent years, Twitter has introduced endless new features to attract new users and retain existing ones. However, some functions feel forced and completely unnecessary . The case of Fleets is a good example. Other features that the community has requested for so long, such as the ability to edit tweets, are completely ignored.
The truth is that Twitter is being “inspired” by other social platforms to come up with its next news. On the way is the Super Follow , a proposal similar to Patreon to offer exclusive content through a paid subscription. We must not forget, in addition, the Facebook-style reactions , which are still in the testing phase and their public launch is imminent.
