Elon Musk reveals he's bringing back app that's been dead for eight years and all of it's lost videos

Most of the internet's biggest social media platforms have remained at the top of the food chain for over a decade now, barring the relatively recent popularity of TikTok, but one former app sensation died almost as quickly as it blossomed and has been gone for over eight years now.

There's a home for pretty much all forms of content creation across social media right now, with text and image sharing on Facebook and X, image and short form video on Instagram and TikTok, and finally long form video content on YouTube.

There is likely to be a home for your content no matter what you want to create, yet the absence of one app in particular is still felt among the hundreds of millions of people that used it at its peak.

Elon Musk might have brought hope to anyone looking to relive the past though, as a recent announcement and feature drop has led him to boast about the return of a fan favorite app that was killed off nearly a decade ago.

What app is Elon Musk bringing back?

As reported by Dexerto, Elon Musk officially announced back in late July that he was planning on bringing back Vine — the short form video app previously owned by Twitter that was known for its six-second time limit.

Vine was initially released all the way back in 2012, and was quickly picked up just four months later by Twitter for a staggering $30,000,000 fee. It quickly grew in popularity due to its accessible format, and by December 2015 the platform boasted a user base of over 200 million.

However, a failure to make money and demands from certain creators led its owners to shut down the app, with Twitter announcing in October 2016 that users would no longer be able to upload to the platform.

It was then officially shut down in the early months of 2017, with the archive of content produced on the app discontinued two years later, leaving people to rely exclusively on the ever-popular Vine compilations on other platforms like YouTube.

That's why Musk's promise to bring back the much loved app was met with such a positive reception, as people have longed for its return ever since it was shut down.

He previously asked his millions of followers back in 2022 whether he should bring back Vine in a vote where the 'Yes' answer won out with a 69.6% vote share, and he followed that up two years later with another poll that miraculously had the exact same winning percentage.

How is Musk bringing back Vine?

You shouldn't hold on to any hope that you might have of a 1:1 recreation of the Vine experience though, as Musk appears to simply be using the app's name to drum up excitement for his AI tool's latest feature known as 'Grok Imagine'.

"Grok Imagine is AI Vine," the billionaire proclaimed in a recent post on X, and you only need to look at a couple of the videos generated by the prompt-based tool to see virtually no resemblance of what made Vine special.

At the moment they appear to be nothing more than short, lifeless clips generated using artificial intelligence that typically also skew towards the not-safe-for-work variety — with Musk himself posting a video of a scantily clad silver-haired woman with angel wings as a demonstration of the tool's abilities.

What is a glimmer of hope for many that do wish for the return of Vine in some capacity though is Musk's announcement that the archive is set to return, as that was the primary way that people managed to share their favorite videos.

"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," Musk revealed.

It's unclear when this will become available to users, but hopefully it's soon so that we can dive back into the goldmine of videos that were created during Vine's short but memorable service.