Threads is Poised to Unveil a Fleets-Like Feature for Ephemeral Posts

Historical tweets from well-known personalities, including celebrities, politicians, and others, frequently resurface, shedding light on past indiscretions like undeveloped views, inflammatory remarks, hurtful statements, harsh messaging, mistaken decisions, and more. As it stands, X users (the platform formerly known as Twitter) must rely on third-party solutions to erase their X history. However, Meta’s development of a new Threads feature could provide a native answer: posts that vanish.

This novel functionality, currently in development, would enable posts and their responses to vanish after 24 hours. It’s designed to alleviate concerns about the longevity of online postings, enticing users to engage with Threads for spontaneous content rather than merely browsing. This feature could also benefit those making off-brand or non-central posts to their usual content themes.

Discovered by technologist and reverse engineering expert Chris Messina, he highlighted that these ephemeral posts would remain exclusive to Threads and wouldn’t be shared on the fediverse. On a recent Tuesday, Threads enabled integration with the fediverse, the decentralized social networking realm powered by ActivityPub that spans Mastodon and beyond. By activating fediverse sharing, your Threads content is visible on a wider network. However, these ephemeral posts would stay within Threads, given the current inability to erase them from the fediverse.

It remains uncertain if or when Threads will initiate wider testing for its disappearing posts. A spokesperson from Meta confirmed that the feature is still in its internal prototype phase and hasn’t been rolled out for external testing.

Should disappearing posts become a staple feature for Threads users, it could notably enhance Threads’ appeal by making it the exclusive hub for viewing these temporary contents. Threads, already boasting over 200 million monthly active users and outperforming Mastodon’s numbers, could attract more attention with such unique content offerings.

Moreover, the introduction of this feature could attract users moving away from Elon Musk’s X, especially after the discontinuation of Twitter’s Fleets feature pre-acquisition, leaving users without a native option for ephemeral content. Currently, erasing X posts requires using third-party services like TweetDeleter, TweetDelete, TweetEraser, Redact, among others.