After shutting down Vine in 2017, former Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey is investing in a reboot of the app with more than 10,000 six-second videos archived.
When Twitter, now X, shut down Vine in 2017, users thought its six-second videos were gone forever. But now the former CEO who shut down the app is helping to bring them back.
Jack Dorsey, the former head of Twitter and now CEO (or Blockhead) of payments company Block, is backing a Vine reboot app called diVine that plans to bring back 10,000 archived videos from the defunct platform that was thought lost to the world. The new app, funded by Dorsey’s nonprofit “and Other Stuff,” will also take a strong stance against AI-generated content that has begun to proliferate across the web, with special filters to prevent AI posts.
The Vine reboot effort could also beat Elon Musk to the punch. The world’s richest man and owner of
X did not immediately respond to Fortunerequest for comment.
diVine is run by Evan Henshaw-Plath, also known by his longtime online persona Rabble, whose relationship with Dorsey dates back to Odeo, a podcasting app from which Twitter grew as a side project. Part of the vision for creating the diVine app, he said TechCrunch, was to take the technology back to the pre-AI, Web 2.0 days, for the sake of nostalgia.
“So basically I’m like, can we do something nostalgic?” he said. “Can we do something that takes us back, that lets us see these old things, but also lets us see an era of social media where you could either have control of your algorithms, or choose who you follow, and it’s just your feed, and where you know it’s a real person who recorded the video?”
After a few months of research and coding, Henshaw-Plath was able to extract a “good percentage” of the most popular Vine videos and their associated user accounts by digging through an archive created at the time of its closure by an archiving group aptly called Archive Team, which aims to preserve websites in danger of disappearing.
Former Vine users who have their videos reactivated can also reclaim their old accounts by proving they still have access to the social media accounts listed in their dead Vine profiles. They can also request their withdrawal.
The rebooted app is hosted by an open source decentralized protocol backed by Dorsey called Nostr, which he says puts DiVine above the need for venture capitalists, toxic business models, or large engineering teams. This time, Vine videos won’t be lost to history, he added.
“The reason I funded the nonprofit and Other Stuff is to enable creative engineers like Rabble to show what is possible in this new world, using permissionless protocols that cannot be stopped at the whim of a business owner,” Dorsey said in a statement to TechCrunch.
