Threads might give us a sensible option we’ve always wanted from Twitter

Let’s face it, there’s no real value in keeping around stuff you said on Twitter (or X, if you must) ten years ago.

Apart from the odd “I called that!”, only bad things can come posted by your tweets your younger, less-rounded self surfacing in 2024.

The trouble is, if you want to delete those tweets en masse, it’s probably going to cost you a few quid. The main services like TweetDelete are now subscription based, making it difficult to purge your record for free without manually doing the deed on every single tweet.

Meta’s Threads, which hasn’t really done a very good job of distinguishing itself from everything people dislike about Twitter under Elon Musk, might soon give you the option.

In a post on Threads, bossman Adam Mosseri said it the app maker is beginning to test the option to archive older posts and make Threads more ephemeral. If the feature rolls out, it’ll enable users to turn on the setting manually, or automatically archive the posts after a certain period of time.

He writes: “We’re starting to test the option to archive posts with a small number of people. You can do this manually, for individual posts, or choose to automatically archive all posts after a certain period of time.

“If you want to make your post public again, you can always unarchive it whenever you’d like. I ran a poll white back and the resounding feedback was not to make this the default, so we’re gonna try it as an option.”

While there are ways to delete many Twitter posts at the same time, the option doesn’t exist within the first-party framework, so this development would be welcome if Threads rolls it out.

Elsewhere today, we learned that Threads has amassed 150 million active users. That’s up 20 million on February’s total.