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Your favorite Vine videos may soon be easier to find. X owner Elon Musk says it has recently found the archive of videos posted to the platform through to 2016, and it plans to restore access for people to be able to view and share clips again.
On social media network X, Musk said, “Btw, we recently found the Vine video archive (thought it had been deleted) and are working on restoring user access, so you can post them if you want.”
Twitter, which Musk bought in 2022, owned Vine from 2012 through to its closure. The app stopped users uploading from late 2016. An archive remained for around two and a half years before being closed in 2019. Since then, it has been difficult to find some Vine clips online, especially if they weren't among the most iconic videos.
It now appears someone at X has found the old archives, and the company is working on a tool to help you view and share old clips again. It may be that this is built directly into X rather than resurrecting the Vine app. Previously the archive was a stripped-down version of Vine where you could share videos to Twitter.
Vine was popular in its short lifespan allowing users to share 6-second long looping videos. Some of the videos uploaded have had a significant cultural impact on users, especially among millennials. Some videos have also moved over to the spiritual successor of TikTok.
Could Musk be thinking of a full reboot to rival the power of TikTok? Musk has been open about his desire to bring back Vine. Soon after purchase, he polled his followers on X where almost 70% of users said they’d want to see the service return. At the time, Axios also reported that X had a team working on a Vine reboot, but it didn’t come to fruition.
Musk announced the return of Vine's archives alongside his promotion of an update to Grok with a new image and video generation tool. It's called Grok Imagine, and it's exclusive for SuperGrok or X Premium+ subscribers. Grok Imagine is able to create NSFW content with a feature called "spicy mode," allowing you to create both explicit images and video.