As generative AI content begins to populate our social apps, a project is being launched with the support of Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey to bring back Vine's six-second looping videos. On Thursday, a new app called divine will provide access to more than 100,000 archived Vine videos, restored from an old backup created before Vine shut down.
The application will not exist simply as a memory; it will also allow users to create profiles and upload their own new Vine videos. However, unlike traditional social networks where AI content is often flagged haphazardly, diVine will flag suspicious AI-generated content and prevent it from being published.
The creation of DiVine was funded by Jack Dorsey's non-profit organization “and other things“, created in May 2025. The new effort aims to fund open-source pilot projects and other tools that could change the social media landscape.
To create diVine, Evan Henshaw-Plath, an early Twitter employee and member of the group “and other things”“, explored the Vine archive. After Twitter announced that closing the short video app in 2016 his videos were supported by a group called The Archive team. This community archiving project is not affiliated with Archive.org, but rather is a collective that works together to save internet sites that are in danger of being lost.
Unfortunately, the group stored Vine content as large binary files of 40–50 GB in size, which would have been inaccessible to those who simply wanted to watch old Vine videos. The fact that the archive existed prompted Henshaw-Plat (who goes by Rabble) to see if old Vine content could be extracted so it could serve as the basis for a new Vine-like mobile app.
“So I was like, can we do something nostalgic?” he told TechCrunch. “Can we do something that takes us back, that allows us to see these old things, but also allows us to see the age of social media, where you can either control your algorithms or choose who you follow, and it's just your feed, and where you know it's a real person who recorded the video?”
Rabble spent a couple of months writing big data scripts and figuring out how the files worked, then reverse-engineered them along with information about old Vine users and user interactions with the videos, such as their views and even some of the original comments.
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“I wasn't able to get all of them, but I was able to get a lot of them and basically reverse engineer these Vines and these Vine users and give every person a new user. [profile] on this open network,” he said.
Rabble estimates that the app contains a “good percentage” of Vine's most popular videos, but not a large number of long tails. For example, he says there are millions of K-pop videos that haven't even been archived.
“We have 150,000 to 200,000 videos from about 60,000 creators,” he noted, adding that Vine initially had several million users and several million creators for comparison.
Vine creators who still own the copyright to their work can submit a DMCA takedown request to diVine if they want their Vines removed, or they can prove that they are the account owners by demonstrating that they still have the social media accounts that were originally listed in their Vine bio. (However, this process is not automated, so there may be a delay if a large number of authors try to do this at the same time.)
Once they get their account back, they will also be able to post new videos or upload their old content that was missed during the recovery process.
To ensure that new videos it uploads are human-made, Rabble uses technology from human rights nonprofit The Project Guardianwhich helps verify that the content was actually recorded on the smartphone, as well as perform other checks.
Additionally, because it is based on Nostr, Dorsey's preferred decentralized protocol, and is open source, developers can customize and build their own applications, as well as run their own hosts, relays, and media servers.
“Nostr, the underlying open-source protocol used by diVine, gives developers the ability to build the next generation of applications without the need for venture capital support, toxic business models or huge teams of engineers,” Jack Dorsey said in a provided statement. “The reason I funded the non-profit Other Things is to allow creative engineers like Rabble to show what is possible in this new world using permissionless protocols that cannot be turned off at the whim of the company owner.”
The current owner of Twitter/X, Elon Musk, has also promised to bring back Vine. announcing in August that the company had discovered an old video archive. But so far nothing has been publicly presented. Meanwhile, the Dorsey-backed diVine project believes that since the content comes from an online archive and the authors still own their copyrights, it is fair use.
Rabble also believes there is consumer demand for this type of non-AI social experience, despite the popularity of generative AI content and the widespread adoption of apps like OpenAI's Sora and Meta AI.
“Companies see participation in artificial intelligence and think people want it,” Rabble explained. “They're confusing, like – yes, people do this; yes, we use these things – but we also want agency in our lives and social experiences. So I think it's nostalgia for the early era of Web 2.0, for the era of blogging, for the era that gave us podcasts, the era when you were building communities rather than just playing the algorithm,” he said.
DiVine is available on both iOS and Android at diVine.video.
