diVine revives Vine with 100k videos and blocks generative AI uploads
On Thursday, a new app called diVine launched, backed by Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey, providing access to over 100,000 archived Vine videos and allowing users to post new content while filtering generative AI.
The diVine app offers restored Vine videos from an older backup created before the original Vine shutdown. Users can create profiles and upload new short-form videos. DiVine will flag suspected generative AI content, preventing its publication, a distinction from traditional social media platforms.
Jack Dorsey’s nonprofit, “and Other Stuff,” established in May 2025, financed diVine’s creation. This initiative focuses on funding open-source projects and tools capable of transforming the social media landscape.
Evan Henshaw-Plath, an early Twitter employee and member of “and Other Stuff,” developed diVine. After Twitter announced Vine’s shutdown in 2016, the Archive Team, a community archiving project, backed up its videos. This collective saves internet websites at risk of loss.
The Archive Team saved Vine’s content as large, 40-50 GB binary files. Henshaw-Plath, known as Rabble, explored extracting this content to form the basis for a new Vine-like mobile application.
Rabble spent several months scripting and reconstructing files, including information on old Vine users and their engagement data like views and a subset of comments. He told TechCrunch, “Can we do something that takes us back, that lets us see those old things, but also lets us see an era of social media where you could either have control of your algorithms, or you could choose who you follow, and it’s just your feed, and where you know that it’s a real person that recorded the video?”
He reconstructed Vine videos and user profiles, creating new user accounts on an open network. Rabble estimates the app contains a “good percentage” of popular Vine videos but not a large number of the “long tail.” For instance, millions of K-pop videos were never archived.
“We have about 150,000 to 200,000 of the videos from about 60,000 of the creators,” Rabble stated. Vine initially had millions of users and creators.
Vine creators maintain copyright ownership of their work. They can issue a DMCA takedown request for video removal or verify account ownership by demonstrating possession of social media accounts linked in their original Vine bio. This process is not automated, potentially causing delays with numerous requests.
Verified creators can post new videos or upload old content missed during the restoration. To verify new video uploads as human-made, Rabble employs technology from the human rights nonprofit the Guardian Project, confirming content recording on a smartphone, along with other checks.
Built on Nostr, a decentralized, open-source protocol favored by Dorsey, diVine allows developers to set up apps and run their own hosts, relays, and media servers. Jack Dorsey stated, “Nostr — the underlying open source protocol being used by diVine — is empowering developers to create a new generation of apps without the need for VC-backing, toxic business models or huge teams of engineers.” He added, “The reason I funded the non-profit, and Other Stuff, is to allow creative engineers like Rabble to show what’s possible in this new world, by using permissionless protocols which can’t be shut down based on the whim of a corporate owner.”
Elon Musk, Twitter/X’s current owner, pledged to revive Vine, announcing in August the discovery of its old video archive, but has not publicly launched anything. The Dorsey-backed diVine project asserts fair use, citing content from an online archive and creators retaining copyrights.
Rabble believes demand exists for this non-AI social experience despite the popularity of generative AI content and apps like OpenAI’s Sora and Meta AI. “Companies see the AI engagement and they think that people want it,” Rabble explained. “They’re confusing, like — yes, people engage with it; yes, we’re using these things — but we also want agency over our lives and over our social experiences. So I think there’s a nostalgia for the early Web 2.0 era, for the blogging era, for the era that gave us podcasting, the era that you were building communities, instead of just gaming the algorithm.”
DiVine is available on both iOS and Android via diVine.video.
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