The social network Twitter, before being bought by Elon Musk and changing its name to X, launched its own Stories format in November 2020.
The launch came in a context where all social networks were launching their ephemeral content, which disappeared 24 hours after being published, following the success of Instagram Stories.
They emerged after LinkedIn launched its Stories feature , following similar initiatives from Facebook, WhatsApp, and YouTube, for example. However, on the former Twitter, Fleets didn’t receive the expected user reception and failed to gain traction.
In fact, they were only available for eight months. On July 15, 2021, the company announced via Twitter that this short-form video format would disappear forever.
Just a few days later, on August 3rd of that year, Fleets were permanently discontinued. Twitter was transparent about the reason for removing its Stories and acknowledged that the Fleets format hadn’t resonated with users , at least not in the way the company had hoped.
In response to a Twitter user’s question about the reason for the closure, the official Twitter account wrote that “we hoped more people would join the conversation on Fleets, but that hasn’t been the case. So we’re deleting it and will focus on improving other parts of Twitter.”
From their launch, Fleets were established as a separate section of the Twitter timeline. To view a user’s Fleets, it was necessary to access their profile, and they could only be viewed through the network’s mobile app.
In May 2021, presumably in an attempt to relaunch the format, Twitter made Fleets more accessible. From that point on, it was possible to view this content directly from the timeline. Twitter also tried inserting advertising into Fleets to generate revenue, but this didn’t help boost their popularity either. Ultimately, they disappeared.
