The company is testing its new “fleets” functionality, allowing users to post tweets that vanish automatically after 24 hours.
For now, the experimental feature is only live in Brazil, but Twitter says it could eventually land in other countries. If fleets do end up becoming widely available, it could fundamentally alter how people interact on Twitter.
The idea, according to Twitter, is to give users a way to share “fleeting thoughts” they might not otherwise be comfortable posting. And, since fleets will only be visible to an account’s followers, it could give users a bit more control over their intended audience.
Until now, the company has been hesitant to make changes that could alter the “permanence” of tweets (which is why we’ll likely never get that edit button). Still, Twitter’s users have shown that there is an appetite for some kind of ephemerality, as evidenced by the growing popularity of services that automatically delete your old tweets.
Fleets is a potential solution: a kind of semi-private tweet that disappears after a day. Of course, if there’s anything the last few years have taught us, it’s that the internet is forever and nothing ever really disappears. At the very least, it’s likely that fleets from high profile users will be screenshotted and shared en masse.
