There’s a Way to make Fleets Work and I Hope Twitter Cares Enough To Make it So

2020/11/22

This month Twitter has been slowly introducing a new feature called “Fleets”. It’s basically a copycat of Instagram’s “Story”: a short post that can be a video, images, or a way to share regular tweets with some filters and text overlays on top, and it’ll be deleted in 24 hours. This feature makes sense on Instagram, where people care about making the posts in their profile look good, where you can’t “retweet” someone’s post, where posts are more solid. It’s like, if your Instagram account is a house, your regular posts are your furnitures. Stories are the time you invite your friends over for tea and snacks; you’ll have food and maybe redecorate a bit, but it will be gone when they left.

If you want to be more cycnical it’s the part of Instagram that’s still a “social media”—the only space where you can still share your life to your friends—as opposed to the increasingly profit-based clout-chasing machine that the rest of it is turning into.

The ecosystem in Twitter is a bit different.

Unlike Instagram’s more tangible posts, Twitter’s “tweets” have always been more fleeting. They’re streams of consciousness, random blobs of thoughts send tweet, thrown into the void or at the mercy of the mass. Some of them catch on, liked and retweeted by dozens then hundreds then maybe thousands if you’re lucky. But even then they all get shuffled about anyway, drops of water in a roiling wave. If you’ve followed a sufficient amount of people, you’ll notice that your feed will look different every minute, or at least every day. There’s always something new and different, something else going on the planet. Like having one hand at the pulse of the world.

Twitter claims that the Fleet feature is for when you want to post your “fleeting thoughts”, but what’s the point when tweets themselves are already fleeting? What’s the point of a post that’ll get deleted in 24 hours when tweets themselves already feel ethereal, drowned in the next hour by all the other thoughts that fill the space?

“Nobody asked for this,” said most everyone who actually uses Twitter. And it sure seems like all Twitter wanted to do is getting on the bandwagon where Instagram and Facebook and all the rest are already at. In all likeliness, Fleets will fall out of use after a couple of months, like all the other features Twitter made that could have been useful, that could have improved how the platform is used, if they actually care about how those features will be used.

Remember Moments? It’s a way for you to string specific tweets together so they can be seen in a single page. Artists can use it as a gallery, so new fan or prospective clients can use it to look at their completed works instead of wading through all the memes or fandom nonsense they tweeted (a valid and Very Twitter way of using the platform!). Instead of improving it, Twitter abandoned it. Moments is a pain to make, a pain to load, and so obscure most Twitter users never even think about it.

Remember List? Despite being right there on the sidebar, Twitter makes no effort to clearly indicate how it can be used: it creates separate a feed, only containing tweets from people you added to it. You can make a list containing just your friends, so you can check it without worrying that their tweets will be buried. You can make lists for your specific interests: one for book authors, one for game developers, one for political figures, for example, and you can open the specific list when you just want to see what’s happening in that specific sphere.

And now, Fleets. If Twitter insist on treating Fleets the way Instagram treats Story, it’ll just end up being extra clutter to the already messy homepage (which, for some people, is by design). To make it useful, Fleets have to be treated differently.

Here are some observations. Unlike tweets, which gets thrown haphazardly into the feed, fleets are always visible at the top, away from the oceanic mess of the timeline. Also, fleets are grouped by user. So you can post as many fleets as you want, and you won’t worry about “spamming” your followers’ timeline. They also can’t be retweeted/reshared. The only way to “comment” on a fleet is by DM-ing the user. See where I’m going with this? Fleets should be limited only to mutuals or those you manually added into it. Just like what Story is for Instagram, Fleet for Twitter can be a way to get in touch with your actual friends.

Because you might not want to see the random thoughts of some intellectual you followed for their philosophical hot takes, but you will want to see whatever dumb shit your friends are up to. And I’m sure those intellectuals would appreciate having a space where they can post their dumb shit without worrying that it’ll be shared wide by strangers.

I’ve been slowly muting every fleets that isn’t from my friends or mutuals, and, well, it’s hard to see the effectiveness considering the feature hasn’t been rolled out for everyone. But I can appreciate the possibility of what this feature can be, if only Twitter isn’t so dead set on copying what other social media do.

Social media, as a concept, was created as a way for friends to keep in touch with each other, but most social media have evolved into their own thing. In the same way that Instagram has transformed into this storefront-portfolio self-promote page thing, Twitter has also developed beyond its “social media” beginning into this… ocean of collective consciousness. But occasionally it’s also the only way you get to know what your friends are up to, and the only way you get to yell about what YOU are up to. It’s also a way that, between all the waves, you can meet and talk to new people and make friends with them.

Fleets can be a way for Twitter to still fulfil that “social media” promise, while not stopping it from being who it is and who it wants to be. I just hope Twitter realise this and can work with itself instead of against itself.