Twitter’s short-lived Stories-style feature launched in 2020 was Fleets. Twitter began testing Fleets in selected markets in March 2020 and released them globally on November 17, 2020. The name referred to quick, passing posts rather than permanent tweets.
Fleets could contain text, photos, videos, and other media, and they disappeared after 24 hours. In the Twitter app, they appeared in a row above the main timeline, closely resembling Stories on platforms such as Snapchat, Instagram, and Facebook. Twitter said the format was intended to encourage people who were uncomfortable posting publicly to share more casually.
The experiment did not last. Twitter announced in July 2021 that it would remove Fleets because the feature was mainly being used by people who already tweeted frequently, rather than attracting many new contributors. Fleets disappeared in August 2021. They are often confused with Moments, but Moments curated existing tweets into longer story collections, while Fleets were temporary individual posts.