Even Twitter has forgotten about Fleets

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge

Remember Fleets, Twitter’s disappearing tweets feature that was shut down just eight and a half months after it launched for everyone? No? Well, Twitter is pretending it doesn’t either — at least according to a tweet from the official @Twitter account on Tuesday:

While @Twitter account is, in general, somewhat silly and works hard to feel like your Extremely Online friend (which makes sense to me because, well, it’s Twitter’s own account on the most Extremely Online platform out there), there’s actually a whole team behind it, according to an August Bloomberg report about who runs the account. So even though this is an admittedly funny tweet, it’s likely not as off-the-cuff as it might seem.

That said, Fleets never really did take off, and they weren’t as popular as similar stories features on Snapchat and Instagram. I hardly ever used the feature; I feel like only a small set of the people I follow actually did. That appears to have been the case for a lot of others, too, and @Twitter poked fun at Fleets on the very day the company announced that they would be disappearing for good:

Scrolling through @Twitter’s timeline, that tweet seems to be one of the account’s most liked and most widely shared, perhaps indicating that Twitter was right to shut down the feature. Though the July tweet was usurped by one from October that just read “hello literally everyone,” which has more than 3.3 million likes.