“Ghost posts” are added to threads that disappear after 24 hours.

Meta X competitor Threads is introducing a new “disappearing post” feature. This will enable the app’s more than 400 million monthly users to share their thoughts and participate in conversations that are automatically archived after 24 hours.

The option, called “ghost posts,” will launch for Threads users around the world on Monday.

Users will now be able to create ghost posts on their mobile devices by turning on the new “ghost” icon on the app’s creation screen. When a post is published, it appears on other people’s timelines with a dotted conversation bubble around it to distinguish it from other content.

Other users can reply to your post on both desktop and mobile devices, but these replies will be sent directly to your DM (direct message). These replies won’t appear on your timeline.

Below the post, you’ll see whether other people have liked or responded to the ghost post, indicated by a smiley face icon. However, only the poster can see the actual number of likes, replies, and who engaged.

After 24 hours, the post will disappear from your timeline, but will remain available to the original poster in the Archives section, accessible from the main settings menu.

(Note: If you turn off message requests, people you don’t follow won’t be able to reply to ghost posts. If you have message requests enabled, replies from people you don’t follow will go to your message request inbox instead. You can adjust these settings from the drop-down menu at the top right of your profile.)

Parent company Meta told TechCrunch that the feature is designed to encourage more low-stakes sharing within feeds.

The addition could also give Threads a new way to challenge Elon Musk’s X. Today’s users have to choose third-party paid services to delete old tweets if they don’t want to do a lot of manual work.

This isn’t the first time the text-first social network has experimented with ephemeral posts. Before X, Twitter experimented with this form of sharing in 2020 with Fleets, which appeared as Disappearing Stories. However, the company discontinued this feature the following year due to low adoption.

Meanwhile, Meta believes there is still potential for disappearing content. This works well on Instagram and Facebook Stories, for example. The company says it expects Threads will encourage people to share more of their unfiltered thoughts, participate in live threads, and experiment with other types of experimental content through ghost posts.

The tech giant has been rapidly iterating on Threads since its launch in July 2023, rolling out features like custom feeds, DMs, Fediverse sharing (which connects Threads to open social networks like Mastodon), and more recently support for up to 10,000 characters with text attachments, tools to hide spoilers, and the launch of an interest-based community.