As generative AI content becomes more common on social media, a new project is launching to revive the six-second looping videos made famous by Vine. This initiative has the backing of Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey. On Thursday, a new app called diVine will provide access to more than 100,000 archived Vine videos. These videos were restored from an older backup created before the original service shut down.
The app is not just a nostalgic archive. It will also allow users to create profiles and upload their own new Vine videos. However, unlike traditional social media platforms where AI content is often poorly labeled, diVine will flag suspected generative AI content and prevent it from being posted.
The creation of diVine was financed by Jack Dorsey’s nonprofit, “and Other Stuff,” which was formed in May 2025. This new effort focuses on funding experimental open source projects and other tools with the potential to transform the social media landscape.
To build diVine, Evan Henshaw-Plath, an early Twitter employee and member of “and Other Stuff,” explored the Vine archive. After Twitter announced it was shutting down the short video app in 2016, its videos were backed up by a group called the Archive Team. This community archiving project is not affiliated with Archive.org, but is a collective that works to save internet websites at risk of being lost.
The group had saved Vine’s content as large binary files, which were not easily accessible to someone who just wanted to watch old Vine videos. The existence of this archive prompted Evan Henshaw-Plath, who goes by Rabble, to see if he could extract the old content to serve as the foundation for a new Vine-like mobile app.
He explained that he wanted to create something nostalgic that would take people back and let them see those old videos. He also wanted to recreate an era of social media where users had control over their algorithms, could choose who to follow, and knew that a real person recorded the video.
Rabble spent months writing data scripts and figuring out how the files worked. He then reconstructed them along with information on the old Vine users and their engagement with the videos, including views and a subset of the original comments.
He estimates the app contains a good percentage of the most popular Vine videos, but not a large number from the long tail. For example, he noted there were millions of K-pop-focused videos that were never archived. The app has about 150,000 to 200,000 videos from approximately 60,000 creators. By comparison, Vine originally had a couple of million users and a few million creators.
Vine creators still own the copyright to their work. They can send diVine a takedown request if they want their Vines removed. Alternatively, they can verify they are the account holder by proving they still control the social media accounts listed in their original Vine bio. This process is not automated, so there could be delays if many creators try to do this at once. Once they regain their account, they can choose to post new videos or upload old content that the restoration process missed.
To verify that new video uploads are made by humans, Rabble is using technology from the human rights nonprofit the Guardian Project. This technology helps verify that content was actually recorded on a smartphone, along with other checks.
Additionally, because diVine is built on Nostr, a decentralized protocol favored by Dorsey, and is open source, developers can set up their own apps and run their own hosts, relays, and media servers.
Jack Dorsey stated that Nostr empowers developers to create a new generation of apps without the need for venture capital backing, toxic business models, or large engineering teams. He explained that he funded the nonprofit to allow creative engineers like Rabble to show what is possible using permissionless protocols that cannot be shut down on the whim of a corporate owner.
Twitter’s current owner, Elon Musk, has also promised to bring back Vine, having announced in August that the company discovered the old video archive. However, nothing has been publicly launched so far. The Dorsey-backed diVine project believes that because the content comes from an online archive and creators still own their copyrights, its use is fair.
Rabble also believes there is consumer demand for this type of non-AI social experience, despite the popularity of generative AI content and widespread adoption of apps like OpenAI’s Sora and Meta AI. He explained that companies see engagement with AI and assume people want it, but he believes people also want agency over their lives and social experiences. He sees a nostalgia for the early Web 2.0 era, a time for building communities instead of just gaming an algorithm.
DiVine is available on both iOS and Android.