Fleets have really only been broadly available for a few months now but Twitter has already decided to can the feature due to it simply not being as popular with users as they had hoped.
Twitter’s Fleets have always been an odd match for the social network when compared to Instagram’s Stories which it was inspired by. While Stories have a place on Instagram due to the platform’s need for instant and disposable content in addition to the highly curated main feed, the main posts on Twitter were already rather instant and disposable by nature which made Fleets immediately redundant.
An official Twitter blog post confirms that this was the main flaw in Fleets and one of the reasons behind the feature’s depreciation.
“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’s Ilya Brown writes in the post. “We’ll explore more ways to address what holds people back from participating on Twitter. And for the people who already are Tweeting, we’re focused on making this better for you.”
Fleets should remain fully functional on the iOS and Android Twitter apps until August 3rd. The limited Fleets functionality recently added to the Windows 10 Twitter app and the web experience will also cease functioning on the same day.
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