Twitter Fleets is dead—but you probably don't use it anyway
Twitter Fleets were fleeting. The feature will be removed from the app in August
Fleets is the Quibi of Twitter; an utterly useless function nobody wants to touch, so it stays neglected in the top bar of the phone app. We go to Twitter for garbage takes, memes, and news—not to see what your acquaintance from college had for dinner or pictures of a friend’s baby. We get enough thirst traps popping up on our timelines, anyway. The Story function’s best kept at Instagram, the shitty site owned by Facebook that we still use for whatever reason so we can try out filters and pretend our lives are fun so acquaintances from high school and college will think we’re cool. But after 8 months, Twitter realized that nobody really wants the equivalent of an Instagram Story on the bird app. So, starting August 3, we’ll pour one out for Fleets. You could say Fleets’ moment on Twitter is… fleeting.
The announcement was made on Twitter (where else?), with a tweet that reads, “We’re removing Fleets on August 3, working on some new stuff. We’re sorry or you’re welcome.”
Twitter is still, for whatever reason, trying to make Spaces—the Clubhouse copy where you get to audio chat with groups of people on Twitter—happen. We really don’t foresee Spaces lasting much longer than Fleets, either, but whatever Jack, you do you. And with the disappearance of Fleets, Twitter is adding yet another useless function: We’ll now get more camera editing features that we had on Fleets, including text formatting in images and GIF stickers on pictures.
While Twitter keeps testing out useless features nobody asked for, the site hasn’t made any important changes, like banning trolls and Nazis, or adding a tweet-editing feature that will save us from pesky typos. So, when are we going to get what we really want?