A Fleeting Glimpse
Unsolicited feedback on Twitter’s new ‘Fleets’ feature
So… Fleets. Oh, Fleets. I said I would wait to weigh in. I have waited a day. I really don’t understand Fleets.
I mean, I do at a conceptual level. Many (most?) people are afraid to tweet. Fleets are like tweets but less rigid. Less permanent. Less text-y. They’re like Stories. Which everyone knows from Instagram, but should know from Snapchat. They’re what the cool kids used before TikTok.
On Twitter, they’re a format in search of a problem. Again, I get the problem they think they’re going after, I just have a hard time seeing how Fleets solves that problem. They’re sort of a clunky, ham-fisted approach to something people would rather do on the aforementioned Instagram or Snapchat. Yes, yes, yes, it worked when Instagram cloned the feature. But that’s because it was a feature that was compatible with Instagram’s core: visual storytelling. That is not Twitter’s core.
I could see a world in which Fleets work, but as a different version of the product which was launched. No one is asking for my product ideas, so I’m going to give them. I would keep Fleets — which is a great name — simple: they’re tweets that go away after a set period of time. They reside not in some unnatural carousel at the top of the feed but in the feed itself. They’re highlighted in some way to showcase their impermanence.¹
That’s it. That’s the product.
Now, couldn’t you just create tweets with such functionality? Just as there are some tweets which anyone can respond to and some which are limited now? Sure, you could do that. But this is more fun. I actually like the idea of making Fleets a more visual-first product, but I would do it in a way that flows in the same tweet feed. Instead of making images a payload option as they are on tweets, with Fleets, you could start with the image and add text if you’d like. This is what you can currently do with Fleets. And tweets with pictures are popular. So we’re close.
The problem, as I see it, is largely with the UI and overhead of how Fleets are currently implemented. Again, I get why Twitter copied the Stories paradigm — it has been proven to work; you don’t need to explain it — but it actively detracts and distracts from Twitter’s core: the feed.
To us power users, having a bunch of avatar bubbles, many with the usernames cut off, is just visual cruft at the top of what we want to be a dense information feed. To non-power users, clicking into Fleets/Stories takes them away from the feed, where they may never come back. And again, you’re not going to out-Story Instagram or Snapchat, so what’s the point?²
I also come bearing an additional gift: another idea. What if instead of being a hugely distracting carousel of heads cluttering up and shoving down a text-heavy feed in ways not seen since Facebook Messenger tried and failed at the same thing for the same reason, we simply put Fleets in a List.
Lists on Twitter are amazing. They always have been. And very few people seem to use them because they require both work to create and maintenance to keep them useful. Fleets could be an excellent gateway drug to Lists. Throw away the bubble heads and instead just swipe to the right for a Fleets Feed. Again, I think this should be a feed in the traditional style and not in the Stories style, but I recognize this may be wrong. In that case, maybe you get to Fleets by swiping to the left and all your other lists are to the right of the main feed. I’m open to riffs on this idea. I just want the second carousel, which functions differently from the top (list) carousel to be removed.
The Fleet Bar has to go.
One more thing: we need to talk about DMs. This is another insanely powerful part of Twitter that has long been underutilized. Fleets helps get DMs a lot more usage, but in a way that makes them decidedly less useful and is training us all to hate such notifications. This is not good.
Reactions to Fleets belong in Notifications with all other… notifications. No need to show them to the world, but the Fleet creator can see them there. If someone actually has something to say in response to a Fleet, that’s fine. That can be a DM, if you have DMs turned on from people you don’t follow. If not, silence remains golden.
Anyway, this is a lot of words about a pretty simple tweak and concept for Fleets. Unsolicited words, no less. But since no one is asking, one of the two ideas above is how I would do it.
¹ That idea — that some content in your Twitter feed has an expiration date — may also lead to people checking it more often? Imagine a “check these Fleets out before they’re gone” type feature. Like those ‘Movies Leaving Netflix This Month’ lists, which I love as a forcing function…
² Just for the record, I also think that Instagram Reels — their TikTok clone — is a confusing mess of a UI/UX.
