According to Elon Musk: X has recovered the Vine archive

Elon Musk and his X-Team have apparently rediscovered the archive of the video platform Vine, which was thought to be lost. In an X post, Musk writes that he wants to give users access to the short videos again. The X boss does not reveal exactly when and how this will happen.

Vine is considered a kind of precursor to today's popular social media services such as TikTok and YouTube Shorts. Vine was one of the first social platforms to establish short videos as an entertainment format – All clips posted there were allowed to be a maximum of six seconds long. Conceptually, this was a good fit for Twitter with its limited number of characters for posts. In 2012, Twitter bought Vine for 30 million US dollars.

Vine was shut down in 2016

However, Vine's long-term success failed to materialize under the Twitter umbrella. In 2016, just four years after the acquisition, the platform was shut down. Users could no longer post new content, but could still access existing short videos. In the following years, however, the archive was also removed.

Since his Twitter takeover, Elon Musk has publicly toyed with the idea of bringing Vine back in some form. In a post, Musk asked whether Twitter users would like the platform back – almost 70 percent said yes. According to a report by Axios in 2022, Musk is said to have put some X developers to work on reviving the Vine platform.

But then things went quiet about a possible Vine revival, which now seems to be off the table. Instead, Musk is apparently focusing on Grok Imagine – a video platform from Grok AI, which Musk describes as an “AI Vine”. Grok Imagine can create short clips and videos on text command, including audio tracks. If desired, you can upload a source image to be animated. The tool is currently available to X Premium+ subscribers.

(dahe)