As AI generative content begins to populate our social apps, a project to bring back Vine’s six-second looping videos is launching with the support of Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey. On Thursday, a new app called diVine will provide access to more than 100,000 archived Vine videos, restored from an old backup created before Vine was shut down.
The app won’t just exist as a throwback to the past; This will also allow users to create profiles and upload their own new Vine videos. However, unlike traditional social media, where AI content is often randomly labeled, diVine will flag suspected generative AI content and prevent its publication.
The creation of DiVine was funded by Jack Dorsey’s non-profit organization, “and Other Stuff”, established in May 2025. The new effort focuses on funding experimental open source projects and other tools with the potential to transform the social media landscape.
To create diVine, Evan Henshaw-Plath, an early Twitter employee and member of “and Other Stuff,” explored the Vine archives. After Twitter announced it was shutting down the short-video app in 2016, its videos were backed up by a group called Archive Team. This community archiving project is not affiliated with Archive.org, but rather is a collective that works together to save websites that are in danger of being lost.
Unfortunately, the group had saved Vine content as large 40-50 GB binary files, which would not be accessible to someone who simply wanted to watch old Vine videos. The fact that the archive existed prompted Evan Henshaw-Plath (who goes by Rabble) to see if it was possible to extract old Vine content to serve as the basis for a new Vine-like mobile app.
“So basically I’m like, can we do something nostalgic?” he told TechCrunch. “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?”
Rabble spent a few months writing big data scripts and understanding how the files worked, then reconstructing them with information about past Vine users and user engagement with the videos, such as their views and even a subset of the original comments.
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“I wasn’t able to extract them all, but I was able to extract a lot of them and basically reconstruct these Vines and these Vine users, and give each person a new user. [profile] on this open network,” he said.
Rabble estimates that the app has a “good percentage” of the most popular Vine videos, but not a large number of long-tail videos. For example, he says there have been millions of K-pop-focused videos that have never even been archived.
“We have about 150,000 to 200,000 videos from about 60,000 creators,” he noted, adding that Vine originally had a few million users and a few million creators in comparison.
Vine creators, who still own the copyright to their work, can send diVine a DMCA takedown request if they want their Vines removed, or they can verify that they are the account holder by demonstrating that they are still in possession of the social media accounts that were originally listed in their Vine bio. (This process is not automated, however, so there could be a delay if a large number of creators attempt to do this at the same time.)
Once their account is recovered, they can also choose to post new videos or upload their old content missed by the restoration process.
To verify that new video uploads are human-made, Rabble uses technology from the human rights nonprofit Guardian Project, which can verify that content was actually recorded on a smartphone, along with other checks.
Additionally, because it is built on Nostr, a decentralized protocol favored by Dorsey, and is open source, developers can configure and build their own applications and run their own hosts, relays, and media servers.
“Nostr – the underlying open source protocol used by diVine – allows developers to create a new generation of applications without the need for venture capital backing, toxic business models, or huge teams of engineers,” Jack Dorsey said in a statement. “The reason I funded the nonprofit and Other Stuff is to allow 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.”
Current Twitter/X owner Elon Musk has also promised to bring back Vine, after announcing in August that the company had discovered old video archives. But so far nothing has been publicly announced. The Dorsey-backed diVine Project, for its part, believes that because the content comes from online archives and the creators still own their copyrights, it is fair use.
Rabble also believes that there is consumer demand for this type of AI-free social experience, despite the popularity of generative AI content and the widespread adoption of applications such as Sora and OpenAI’s Meta AI.
“Companies see the engagement of AI and think people want it,” Rabble explained. “They’re confusing, like – yes, people engage with them; yes, we use these things – but we also want to take action on our lives and on our social experiences. So I think there’s a nostalgia for the beginning of the Web 2.0 era, for the era of blogging, for the era that gave us podcasting, for the era when you were building communities, instead of just messing with the algorithm,” he said.
DiVine is available on iOS and Android at diVine.video.
