Just Months After Launch, Twitter Is Shutting Down Fleets, Its Instagram Stories Competitor

Micro-blogging site Twitter is shutting down Fleets, the company’s feature similar to Instagram Stories that expire after 24 hours. Fleets, that was a relatively new feature launched about eight months ago. It is being shut down due to low usage, Twitter said. Fleets will be completely shut down by August 3 and starting then, users will just see active Spaces – Twitter’s live audio chat rooms – at the top of their timelines. The composer for traditional tweets will be updated with more camera editing features from Fleets, like text-formatting and GIF stickers over photos.

Twitter Fleets came as the company’s attempt at making people tweet more. For years, the company has struggled to get users to post regularly and not just consume other people’s tweets. Fleets was the company’s attempt at doing an Instagram Stories-like format to allow people to feel comfortable joining the conversation on Twitter. “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, on its official Twitter handle, also said that it is working on new stuff. “we’re removing Fleets on August 3, working on some new stuff,” the company said.

Twitter’s axe to the Fleets feature comes as a rather surprising development since the company only rolled out Fleets a few months back in November 2020 and started testing ads between Fleets last month only.

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