Twitter to discontinue Instagram Stories inspired 'Fleets' feature on Aug 3

Twitter on Wednesday announced that it will discontinue its Fleets feature, the platform's own version of stories that disappear after 24 hours, on August 3.

The announcement means the company will end the feature it rolled out last year to compete with the stories features available in Snapchat and Instagram, The Verge reported.

"We hoped Fleets would help more people feel comfortable joining the conversation on Twitter," Ilya Brown, Twitter's vice president of product, said in a statement. "But, in the time since we introduced Fleets to everyone, we haven't seen an increase in the number of new people joining the conversation with Fleets like we hoped."

Twitter introduced Fleets in November 2020. The feature lets Twitter users post full-screen photos, videos, reactions to tweets or plain text that disappears after 24 hours. Fleets came years after Snapchat and Facebook introduced similar options for their users.

"Fleets are mostly used by people who are already Tweeting to amplify their own Tweets and talk directly with others," the company said. "We'll explore more ways to address what holds people back from participating on Twitter."

The Verge reported that Twitter's decision to discontinue Fleets is not just an admission that the feature didn't work, but that the company still hasn't figured out how to get people tweeting more.