Key Highlights
- A new app called diVine is launched to bring back Vine’s six-second looping videos with support from Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey.
- The app will allow users to upload their own new Vine videos and flag suspected generative AI content, preventing it from being posted.
- Jack Dorsey’s nonprofit “and Other Stuff” financed the project, focusing on funding experimental open source projects that can transform social media landscapes.
- The app is built on Nostr, a decentralized protocol, allowing developers to create their own apps and run their own hosts without VC-backing or huge teams of engineers.
New App diVine Revives Vine with AI Controls
As generative artificial intelligence (AI) content begins to fill social media applications, a project aimed at reviving the six-second looping video platform, Vine, is taking shape. The initiative, launched on Thursday, brings back more than 100,000 archived Vine videos from an older backup created before Vine’s shutdown in 2016.
Jack Dorsey’s Support and diVine’s Features
The new app, diVine, is backed by Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey through his nonprofit organization “and Other Stuff,” established in May 2025. This funding is part of a broader effort to support experimental open source projects that could reshape social media platforms.
Unlike traditional social media where AI content can be haphazardly labeled, diVine will implement robust measures. The app will flag suspected generative AI content and prevent its posting, ensuring a more controlled environment for users.
Rewriting Vine’s Legacy
Evan Henshaw-Plath, an early Twitter employee and member of “and Other Stuff,” led the effort to rebuild diVine. After Twitter announced it was shutting down Vine in 2016, its videos were backed up by a community called the Archive Team, preserving a large portion of the content.
“So basically, I’m like, can we do something that’s kind of nostalgic?” Henshaw-Plath told TechCrunch. “Can we do something that takes us back, that lets us see those 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 that it’s a real person that recorded the video?”
Technological Challenges and Solutions
Henshaw-Plath spent several months writing big data scripts to reconstruct Vine content. The app now contains a “good percentage” of the most popular Vine videos, though not all were successfully restored due to the large size of the original archive.
“We have about 150,000 to 200,000 of the videos from about 60,000 of the creators,” Henshaw-Plath said. “Vine had a couple million users and a few million creators by comparison.” Vine creators still own their copyright to the work, allowing them to manage their content through diVine.
Decentralization and Nostr Protocol
To address concerns about centralized control, diVine is built on the decentralized protocol Nostr. This allows developers to set up and create their own apps independently without relying on venture capital (VC) funding or large engineering teams.
“Nostr — the underlying open source protocol being used by diVine — is empowering developers to create a new generation of apps,” Jack Dorsey said in a provided statement. “The reason I funded the non-profit, and Other Stuff, is to allow creative engineers like Rabble to show what’s possible in this new world, by using permissionless protocols which can’t be shut down based on the whim of a corporate owner.”
While Twitter’s current owner, Elon Musk, has announced plans to bring back Vine from its old video archive, diVine is positioned as a fair use project that respects copyright and user agency. The app aims to fill a gap in the market by offering a non-AI social experience.
Conclusion
The launch of diVine represents both a nostalgic journey into the past and a forward-thinking approach to social media design. By combining historical content with modern technology, the project seeks to create an environment that values user control and authenticity over automated AI-generated content. As generative AI continues to shape our digital experiences, initiatives like diVine offer a glimpse of what could be possible in a more decentralized future.
