Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey announced funding for a project to bring back Vine, the platform for legendary six-second videos. Launched on Thursday, the new app, “diVine,” has made more than 100,000 archived videos from Vine’s pre-closure history accessible. This move comes at a time when generative AI content is rapidly flooding social media apps.
The legendary Vine archive has been restored: New app diVine has been introduced
The app doesn’t just promise to relive a throwback to the past. It also allows users to create their own profiles and upload new six-second videos. But diVine’s most striking feature is that, unlike traditional social media platforms, it will identify and flag content suspected of being generated by AI, preventing it from being published on the platform.
DiVine’s development was funded by the nonprofit organization “and Other Stuff,” which Jack Dorsey founded in May 2025. This organization aims to support experimental and open-source projects that have the potential to transform the social media landscape. The app was developed by Evan Henshaw-Plath (Rabble), an early Twitter employee who now works at “and Other Stuff.”
The project is based on videos backed up by a group called the “Archive Team” after Twitter announced its closure of Vine in 2016. This archive consisted of massive 40-50 GB binary files, inaccessible to ordinary users. Henshaw-Plath wanted to test whether he could take this inaccessible archive and turn it into the basis of a mobile app that would both present old content and usher in a new social experience.
In an interview with TechCrunch, Rabble explained that his goal was to provide a nostalgic experience and remind users of the early days of social media. He emphasized that his goal is a platform where users have control over algorithms, can choose chronological feeds, and can be confident that the video they watch was recorded by a real human. Rabble spent months working on scripts to reconstruct these old files, including user profiles, view counts, and even some comments.
The recovered archive contains between 150,000 and 200,000 videos from approximately 60,000 creators. Rabble states that this covers a “good percentage” of the most popular Vines but does not represent the entire platform. For example, it was stated that millions of K-pop-focused videos were never archived at the time.
Former Vine creators who still hold the copyrights can file a DMCA request to have their videos removed. Those who wish can regain their accounts by proving they still control the social media accounts listed in their old Vine bios. Newly uploaded videos will be verified for human-made content using the Guardian Project’s smartphone-recording verification technology.
The app is built on Nostr, a decentralized protocol backed by Jack Dorsey, and is completely open-source. Dorsey stated in a statement that Nostr empowers developers to create next-generation applications without venture capital or “toxic business models.” He added that his nonprofit was founded to demonstrate the potential of protocols that “cannot be shut down by the arbitrary decisions of a corporate owner.”
Elon Musk, the current owner of X (formerly Twitter), announced in August that they had found the old Vine archive and promised to restore the platform, but no concrete action has been taken so far. The diVine team believes that using content from an online archive constitutes “fair use.” Rabble believes that despite the popularity of AI tools like OpenAI’s Sora, people still have a strong demand for AI-free social experiences that focus on community building rather than algorithms.
The new diVine app is available for iOS and Android at diVine.video. Do you miss the old Vine videos? What are your first thoughts on this new anti-AI platform?
