What’s your favourite Vine? You might be able to go back through them all soon.

This isn’t the big announcement that the good old days of Vine are finally back – sorry. But, Elon Musk has suggested that Vine’s video archive could return. In a recent post on X, Musk revealed that the archive had been found, and that the company is now working on restoring user access to those clips.

For those of you who didn’t experience the platform, Vine was a popular app where users shared six-second looping videos. Although all genres and kinds of video were welcome, it was a home for comedic, creative video content, long before TikTok became a household name.

Twitter acquired Vine in 2012 for $30 million, hoping to expand into short-form video content. However, the company failed to support the platform and decided to wind it down in 2016. While uploads were disabled that year, the app was fully discontinued in 2017. An archive remained online briefly but eventually vanished, and many believed the original content was lost for good.

But now, Vine fans rejoice (a little bit, don’t get too ahead of yourself), as Musk claims the lost archive has been unearthed.

The new development is more focused on restoring the past than launching something new – at least on the surface. Musk’s post also included a mention of Grok Imagine, a video creation tool powered by AI. It’s available to X Premium+ subscribers and was described by Musk as “AI Vine.” As TechCrunch hypothesises, this post could be less about Vine, and suggests Musk’s real interest lies more in machine-generated content than human creativity.

So far, it seems like users will be able to post, but probably not download, or remix the old videos – it’ll likely just be a viewing-only situation. Where users will actually be able to view the videos is also unclear currently (although X would probably be a safe bet). As with many Musk-related updates, there’s always a question of how much is a genuine product announcement and how much is simply an attention grab.

For those who loved the simpler time of Vine, this could be a great little walk down memory lane. It also presents an opportunity for current creators to check out what resonated with people back in the earlier days of short-form video.

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