As generative AI content begins to infiltrate social apps, a project is being launched with the help of Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey to bring back Vine’s six-second loop videos. On Thursday, a new app called diVine will give you access to more than 100,000 archived Vine videos restored from old backups created before Vine shut down.
Apps don’t just exist to walk down memory lane. It will also allow users to create a profile and upload their own new Vine videos. However, unlike traditional social media, where AI content is often labeled haphazardly, diVine flags suspected generated AI content and prevents it from being posted.
The creation of DiVine was funded by Jack Dorsey’s nonprofit organization “and Other Stuff,” which was founded in May 2025. This new initiative focuses on funding experimental open source projects and other tools that have the potential to transform the social media landscape.
To build diVine, Evan Henshaw-Plath, an early Twitter employee and member of “and Other Stuff,” scoured the Vine archives. After Twitter announced it was shutting down its short video app in 2016, its videos were backed up by a group called the Archive Team. This community archive project is not affiliated with Archive.org, but is an organization that works together to preserve Internet Web sites that are at risk of being lost.
Unfortunately, the group stored their Vine content as large 40-50 GB binary files, making it inaccessible to people who just wanted to watch old Vine videos. The fact that the archive existed led Henshaw-Plath (who goes by the name Rabble) to see if he could extract old Vine content and use it as the basis for a new Vine-like mobile app.
“Basically, can we do something nostalgic?” he told TechCrunch. “Can we do something that takes us back in time and shows us the age of social media where you can not only see old stuff, but you can control the algorithm, you can choose who you follow, and you know it’s just a feed and it’s a real person who recorded the video?”
Rabble spent two months writing a big data script, figuring out how the files worked, and rebuilding the script with information about old Vine users and user engagement with videos, including view counts and a subset of original comments.
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“We couldn’t take everything out, but we were able to take out a lot of things and basically rebuild 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 includes a “significant percentage” of the most popular Vine videos, but not as many long-tail videos. For example, he says there were millions of K-pop-centric videos that were never even archived.
“We have about 150,000 to 200,000 videos from about 60,000 creators,” he noted, adding that by comparison, Vine originally had millions of users and millions of creators.
Vine creators who still own the copyright to their work and want their Vine removed can verify their ownership by submitting a DMCA removal request to diVine or by proving that they still own the social media account originally listed on their Vine profile. (However, this process is not automated and may cause delays if many creators try to do this at once.)
Once you get your account back, you can post new videos or even upload old content that you missed during the restoration process.
To verify that new video uploads are made by humans, Rabble uses technology from the human rights nonprofit Guardian Project. This technology helps verify that the content was actually recorded on the smartphone and other checks.
Additionally, it’s built on Nostr, Dorsey’s preferred decentralized protocol, and is open source, allowing developers to set up and create their own apps and run their own hosts, relays, and media servers.
“Nostr (the underlying open source protocol used by diVine) enables developers to create a new generation of apps without the need for venture capital backing, toxic business models, or large teams of engineers,” Jack Dorsey said in a provided statement. “The reason I funded this nonprofit and Other Stuff is so that creative engineers like Rabble can show what’s possible in this new world with permissionless protocols that can’t be shut down based on the whims of business owners.”
Twitter/X’s current owner, Elon Musk, also announced in August that the company had discovered old video archives and promised to bring back Vine. But so far nothing has been announced publicly. Meanwhile, the Dorsey-backed diVine project believes it is fair use because the content comes from online archives and the creators still own the copyright.
Rabble also believes that despite the popularity of generated AI content and the proliferation of apps like OpenAI’s Sora and Meta AI, there is consumer demand for this type of non-AI social experience.
“Companies look at AI efforts and think people want AI,” Rabble explained. “They’re disrupted. For example, people are engaging with it. Yes, we use these things. But we also want agency over our lives and social experiences. So I think there’s a nostalgia for the early Web 2.0 era, the blogging era, the era that gave us podcasting, when we were building communities rather than just gaming algorithms,” he said.
DiVine is available on both iOS and Android from diVine.video.
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