As generative AI content material begins to fill our social apps, a mission to convey again Vine’s six-second looping movies is launching with Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey’s backing. On Thursday, a brand new app known as diVine will give entry to greater than 100,000 archived Vine movies, restored from an older backup that was created earlier than Vine’s shutdown.
The app received’t simply exist as a stroll down reminiscence lane; it is going to additionally enable customers to create profiles and add their very own new Vine movies. Nonetheless, in contrast to on conventional social media, the place AI content material is commonly haphazardly labeled, diVine will flag suspected generative AI content material and stop it from being posted.
DiVine’s creation was financed by Jack Dorsey’s nonprofit, “and Other Stuff,” shaped in Might 2025. The brand new effort is concentrated on funding experimental open supply tasks and different instruments which have the potential to rework the social media panorama.
To construct diVine, Evan Henshaw-Plath, an early Twitter worker and member of “and Other Stuff,” explored the Vine archive. After Twitter introduced it was shutting down the quick video app in 2016, its movies had been backed up by a bunch known as the Archive Staff. This group archiving mission shouldn’t be affiliated with Archive.org, however is somewhat a collective that works collectively to save lots of web web sites which can be in peril of being misplaced.
Sadly, the group had saved Vine’s content material as giant, 40-50 GB binary recordsdata, which wouldn’t be accessible to somebody who simply needed to look at some outdated Vine movies. The actual fact the archive existed prompted Evan Henshaw-Plath (who goes by the title Rabble) to see if it was attainable to extract the outdated Vine content material to function the premise for a brand new Vine-like cell app.
“So basically, I’m like, can we do something that’s kind of nostalgic?” he informed 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?”
Rabble spent a few months writing large knowledge scripts and determining how the recordsdata labored, then reconstructed them together with the knowledge on the outdated Vine customers and the person engagement with the movies, like their views and even a subset of the unique feedback.
Techcrunch occasion
San Francisco
|
October 13-15, 2026
“I wasn’t able to get all of them out, but I was able to get a lot out and basically reconstruct these Vines and these Vine users, and give each person a new user [profile] on this open network,” he mentioned.
Rabble estimates the app accommodates a “good percentage” of the preferred Vine movies, however not numerous the lengthy tail. As an example, he says there have been thousands and thousands of Okay-pop-focused movies that had been by no means even archived.
“We have about 150,000 to 200,000 of the videos from about 60,000 of the creators,” he famous, including that, initially, Vine had a few million customers and some million creators by comparability.
Vine creators, who nonetheless personal the copyright to their work, can ship diVine a DMCA takedown request if they need their Vines eliminated, or they will confirm they’re the account holder by demonstrating they’re nonetheless in possession of the social media accounts that had been initially listed of their Vine bio. (This course of isn’t automated, although, so there could possibly be a delay if numerous creators strive to do that without delay.)
As soon as they’ve their account again, they will additionally select to put up new movies or add their outdated content material that the restoration course of missed.
To confirm that new video uploads are human-made, Rabble is utilizing know-how from the human rights nonprofit the Guardian Challenge, which helps to confirm that content material was really recorded on a smartphone, together with different checks.
Plus, as a result of it’s constructed on Nostr, a decentralized protocol favored by Dorsey, and is open supply, builders can arrange and create their very own apps and run their very own hosts, relays, and media servers.
“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,” Jack Dorsey mentioned in a offered assertion. “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.”
Twitter/X’s present proprietor, Elon Musk, has additionally promised to convey again Vine, having introduced in August that the corporate found the outdated video archive. However up to now, nothing has been publicly launched. The Dorsey-backed diVine mission, in the meantime, believes that as a result of the content material is coming from a web based archive and creators nonetheless personal their copyrights, it’s honest use.
Rabble additionally believes there’s shopper demand for any such non-AI, social expertise, regardless of the recognition of generative AI content material and widespread adoption of apps like OpenAI’s Sora and Meta AI.
“Companies see the AI engagement and they think that people want it,” defined Rabble. “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,” he mentioned.
DiVine is accessible on each iOS and Android at diVine.video.
