Jack Dorsey Funds Divine: Vine Reboot with Original Archive

A Vine Revival: diVine Launches with Jack Dorsey’s Support

With generative AI content increasingly prevalent across social media platforms, a new initiative is underway to resurrect the popular six-second looping videos of Vine. This project, backed by Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey, is launching an app called diVine. The app will provide access to over 100,000 archived Vine videos, recovered from a backup created prior to the platform’s closure.

More Than Just Nostalgia

diVine isn’t simply intended as a trip down memory lane. Users will be able to establish profiles and contribute their own new Vine videos. A key differentiator, however, is its approach to AI-generated content. Unlike many social networks, diVine will actively identify and prevent the posting of content suspected to be created by artificial intelligence.

Funding and the Archive’s Recovery

The development of diVine was funded by Jack Dorsey’s nonprofit organization, “and Other Stuff,” established in May 2025. This organization focuses on supporting experimental, open-source projects and tools with the potential to reshape the social media landscape.

Evan Henshaw-Plath, a former Twitter employee and member of “and Other Stuff,” spearheaded the effort to rebuild diVine. He initially explored the existing Vine archive, which had been preserved by a group known as the Archive Team following Twitter’s announcement of Vine’s shutdown in 2016.

Challenges in Accessing the Archive

The Archive Team, a collective dedicated to preserving at-risk internet websites, had saved Vine’s content as substantial binary files, ranging from 40 to 50 GB in size. This format rendered the videos inaccessible to casual viewers. This realization prompted Henshaw-Plath, also known as Rabble, to investigate the feasibility of extracting the content to form the foundation for a new Vine-inspired mobile application.

Reconstructing the Past

“The core question was, could we recreate something reminiscent of the original?” Rabble explained to TechCrunch. “Could we offer a return to a time when users had control over their algorithms, could choose who to follow, and were assured that the videos they viewed were created by genuine individuals?”

Over several months, Rabble developed large-scale data scripts to decipher the file structure and reconstruct the original Vines. He also successfully recovered information about the original Vine users and their engagement with the videos, including view counts and a portion of the original comments.

“While a complete recovery wasn’t possible, a significant amount of data was salvaged, allowing for the reconstruction of Vines and user profiles within a new, open network,” he stated.

Archive Limitations

Rabble estimates that the app contains a “good percentage” of the most popular Vine videos, but acknowledges that a substantial portion of the long tail content is missing. For example, the archive did not include the millions of videos focused on K-pop.

“Currently, we have approximately 150,000 to 200,000 videos from around 60,000 creators,” he noted, contrasting this with Vine’s original user base of several million users and creators.

Copyright and Content Verification

Vine creators retain the copyright to their work and can request the removal of their Vines through a DMCA takedown notice. Alternatively, they can verify their account ownership by demonstrating continued possession of the social media accounts originally linked to their Vine profile. (This verification process is currently manual and may experience delays during periods of high demand.)

Verified creators will also have the option to upload new videos or re-upload content that was not included in the initial restoration process.

To ensure the authenticity of new video uploads, Rabble is utilizing technology from the Guardian Project, a human rights nonprofit, to verify that content was recorded on a smartphone and to implement other verification checks.

Built on Decentralization

Furthermore, diVine is built on Nostr, a decentralized protocol favored by Dorsey, and is open source. This allows developers to create their own applications, establish their own hosts, relays, and media servers.

“Nostr, the open-source protocol powering diVine, is enabling developers to build a new generation of applications without relying on venture capital, harmful business models, or large engineering teams,” Jack Dorsey stated. “My funding of ‘and Other Stuff’ aims to empower creative engineers like Rabble to demonstrate the possibilities within this new landscape, utilizing permissionless protocols that cannot be arbitrarily shut down by corporate entities.”

Competition with X

Elon Musk, the current owner of Twitter/X, has also expressed interest in reviving Vine, announcing the discovery of the original video archive in August. However, no public launch has occurred to date. The diVine project believes its use of an online archive and respect for creator copyrights constitutes fair use.

Addressing a Desire for Authentic Social Experiences

Rabble also believes there is a consumer demand for social experiences that are not dominated by AI-generated content, despite the increasing popularity of tools like OpenAI’s Sora and Meta AI.

“Companies are interpreting engagement with AI as a desire for more AI,” Rabble explained. “They are overlooking the fact that while people are using these tools, they also value agency and control over their social lives. There’s a growing nostalgia for the early Web 2.0 era, for blogging, podcasting, and building communities, rather than simply manipulating algorithms.”

DiVine is currently available for download on both iOS and Android devices at diVine.video.