With generative AI content increasingly populating our social platforms, a new initiative to revive Vine’s iconic six-second looping videos is launching, supported by Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey. On Thursday, an app named diVine will debut, offering access to over 100,000 Vine clips that have been recovered from a backup created before Vine was discontinued.
This app isn’t just a nostalgic archive; users will be able to set up profiles and upload fresh Vine-style videos. Unlike most social networks, where AI-generated content is often poorly marked, diVine will actively detect and block suspected AI-generated videos from being uploaded.
Image Credits:diVine
Funding for diVine came from Jack Dorsey’s nonprofit “and Other Stuff,” which was established in May 2025. This organization aims to support innovative open source projects and tools that could reshape the social media environment.
To create diVine, Evan Henshaw-Plath, an early Twitter team member and part of “and Other Stuff,” delved into the Vine archives. After Twitter revealed plans to close Vine in 2016, a group known as the Archive Team backed up the videos. This volunteer effort, separate from Archive.org, is dedicated to preserving at-risk websites across the internet.
However, the Archive Team had stored Vine’s data in massive binary files of 40-50 GB each, making it impractical for casual viewing. Discovering this archive inspired Henshaw-Plath (also known as Rabble) to attempt extracting the old Vine videos to form the foundation of a new mobile app reminiscent of Vine.
Image Credits:diVine
“So basically, I wondered, can we create something that taps into nostalgia?” he shared with TechCrunch. “Can we build something that lets us revisit those old moments, but also experience a time in social media where you could control your feed, choose who to follow, and be sure the videos were made by real people?”
Rabble spent several months developing data scripts and deciphering the file formats, eventually reconstructing the videos along with user data and engagement metrics such as views and a portion of the original comments.
“I couldn’t recover everything, but I managed to extract a significant amount and essentially rebuild these Vines and their creators, assigning each a new profile on this open network,” he explained.
According to Rabble, the app features a “substantial portion” of the most well-known Vine videos, though many less popular clips are missing. For example, he noted that millions of K-pop-related videos were never archived at all.
Image Credits:diVine
“We currently have between 150,000 and 200,000 videos from around 60,000 creators,” he said, pointing out that Vine originally boasted millions of users and creators.
Vine creators retain the rights to their content and can request removal from diVine via a DMCA takedown, or prove account ownership by showing access to the social accounts linked in their Vine bios. (This isn’t an automated process, so there may be delays if many creators make requests at once.)
Once their accounts are restored, creators can upload new videos or add any old content that wasn’t recovered during the restoration.
To confirm that new uploads are genuinely made by humans, Rabble is leveraging technology from the Guardian Project, a human rights nonprofit, which verifies that videos were actually recorded on a smartphone, among other verification methods.
Image Credits:diVine
Additionally, since diVine is built on Nostr—a decentralized, open source protocol favored by Dorsey—developers are free to create their own applications and operate their own servers, relays, and media hosts.
“Nostr, the open source protocol powering diVine, enables developers to build a new wave of apps without relying on venture capital, problematic business models, or massive engineering teams,” Jack Dorsey stated. “I created the nonprofit, and Other Stuff, to empower inventive engineers like Rabble to demonstrate what’s possible with open protocols that can’t be shut down at the discretion of a corporation.”
Elon Musk, who now owns Twitter/X, has also pledged to revive Vine, announcing in August that the company had located the old video archive. However, nothing has been released to the public yet. In contrast, the Dorsey-supported diVine project maintains that since the videos come from an online archive and creators still hold their copyrights, their use is justified as fair use.
Image Credits:diVine
Rabble also believes there’s a real appetite for a social platform that isn’t dominated by AI, even as generative AI and apps like OpenAI’s Sora and Meta AI become more widespread.
“Companies see high engagement with AI and assume that’s what people want,” Rabble said. “But they’re missing the point—yes, people interact with AI, but we also crave control over our digital lives and social interactions. There’s a longing for the early days of Web 2.0, for the blogging era, for the time when communities were built organically rather than just chasing algorithms,” he added.
DiVine can be downloaded for both iOS and Android.
