Old tweets from stars, celebrities, politicians and other public figures often come back to haunt them, exposing their embarrassing, unevolved opinions from their youth, offensive comments, abusive messages, errors in judgment, and worse. While users on X (formerly Twitter) only have third-party options to wipe out their X history, a feature Meta is developing for Threads could offer a built-in solution: ephemeral posts.
The company has been spotted working on a new feature that would allow a post — as well as all its replies — to disappear in 24 hours. The option could encourage those who are worried about the permanence of their social media content to post to Threads instead of just passively scrolling. It could also be used for those occasional posts that aren’t part of a creator’s brand-building efforts or are generally off-topic for your account.
The feature was uncovered by technologist and reverse engineer Chris Messina, who also noted that these 24-hour disappearing posts would not be shared to the fediverse. In June, Threads integrated with the fediverse, or the decentralized social network powered by the ActivityPub protocol that includes Mastodon and other apps. By enabling fediverse sharing on your Threads account, your posts are distributed to this network where they can reach a wider audience. But Threads isn’t able to delete posts from the fediverse, for the time being, which is why the ephemeral posts would remain exclusive to Threads.
Whether the disappearing posts on Threads will ever roll out for broader testing remains to be seen. A Meta spokesperson confirmed that the feature is only an internal prototype and not currently being tested externally.
Of course, if a number of Threads users chose to adopt disappearing posts, that could make the Threads app more attractive as it would be the only place to view this limited-time-only content. Already, Threads has dwarfed open social platform Mastodon with its now over 200 million monthly active users, compared with Mastodon’s under a million. Exclusive content could increase Threads’ draw.
The feature could also help to bring in more users abandoning Elon Musk’s X, which no longer offers any sort of ephemeral content after Twitter shut down its Fleets feature pre-acquisition. As a result, the only way to disappear X posts is via third-party services like TweetDeleter, TweetDelete, TweetEraser, Redact and others.
