A project to revive Vine’s iconic six-second looping videos is launching — and it has the backing of Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey. On Thursday, a new app called diVine will open access to more than 100,000 restored Vine clips, pulled from a backup created before the platform shut down.
The app isn’t just a nostalgia portal. Users will be able to create profiles and upload brand-new Vine-style videos. Crucially, diVine plans to block suspected generative AI clips, a notable departure from today’s major social platforms, where AI content is often inconsistently labelled or not labelled at all.
Backed by Dorsey’s new nonprofit
DiVine is funded by and Other Stuff, Dorsey’s nonprofit launched in May 2025 to support experimental open-source projects and alternative approaches to social media.
To build the new app, Evan Henshaw-Plath — an early Twitter employee known as Rabble — dug into an archive created by the volunteer group Archive Team. When Twitter shut down Vine in 2016, Archive Team saved its videos, but only as massive 40–50GB binary files that were practically impossible to browse. Rabble spent months writing data-processing scripts to extract videos, metadata, view counts, and a portion of the original comments.
Reconstructing Vine
The result is a large but incomplete restoration:
- 150,000–200,000 videos
- Around 60,000 creators
Many lesser-known videos never made it into the original backup, including millions of K-pop clips. Still, Rabble says the archive includes a substantial portion of Vine’s most popular posts.
Creators still hold the copyright to their videos. They can file DMCA takedown requests or reclaim their accounts by proving ownership of the social profiles linked in their original Vine bios. Once verified, they can post new videos or re-upload anything missing from the restored archive.
Guarding against AI content
To ensure new uploads come from real humans, diVine uses verification tools from the Guardian Project, a human-rights organisation that authenticates smartphone-recorded media. Any video flagged as generative AI will be blocked from posting.
Built on Nostr and fully open source
DiVine runs on Nostr, the decentralized protocol strongly championed by Dorsey. Because it’s open source, developers can build their own interfaces, run their own relays, and host their own media servers.
Dorsey said in a statement that Nostr enables a new generation of apps that don’t require venture capital or “toxic business models,” adding that projects like diVine show what’s possible when social tools aren’t controlled by a single corporate owner.
Elon Musk has also floated the idea of reviving Vine, stating in August that X has located the old archives — but no launch has occurred yet. DiVine’s creators believe that because the videos come from an online archive and the copyrights remain with the original creators, their use falls under fair-use principles.
A push for human-made social media
Rabble believes there’s growing appetite for social platforms built around real people, not generative AI.
“Companies see high AI engagement and assume that’s what people want,” he said. “But people also want agency — and a return to the early Web 2.0 feeling of building communities rather than playing to algorithms.”
DiVine is available now on iOS and Android at diVine.video.
