Jack Dorsey is funding diVine, a Vine reboot featuring Vine’s video archive | TechCrunch

As generative AI content begins to fill our social apps, a project to bring back Vine’s six-second looping videos is launching, with the support of Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey. A new app called on Thursday divine provides access to over 100,000 archived Vine videos, restored from an older backup created before Vine shut down.

The app won’t just exist as a reminder; it also allows users to create profiles and upload their own new Vine videos. Unlike traditional social media, where AI content is often labeled haphazardly, diVine will flag suspected generative AI content and prevent it from being posted.

The creation of DiVine was funded by the nonprofit organization Jack Dorsey: “and other things”, founded in May 2025. The new effort aims to fund 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 contributor and member of ‘and Other Stuff,’ explored the Vine archive. After Twitter announced it was shutting down the short video app in 2016, the 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 working together to save Internet websites that are in danger of being lost.

Unfortunately, the group had stored Vine’s content as large 40 to 50 GB binaries, which wouldn’t be accessible to someone who just wanted to watch some old Vine videos. The fact that the archive existed prompted Evan Henshaw-Plath (who goes by the name Rabble) to see if it was possible to extract the old Vine content to serve as the basis for a new Vine-like mobile app.

“So basically I’m thinking, can we do something that’s a little bit nostalgic?” he told TechCrunch. “Can we do something that takes us back, that shows us those old things, but also shows us an era of social media where you can control your algorithms, or you can choose who you follow, and it’s just your feed, and you know it’s a real person who recorded the video?”

Rabble spent a few months writing big data scripts and figuring out how the files worked, then reconstructed them along with information about the old Vine users and user engagement with the videos, such as their opinions and even a subset of the original comments.

“I wasn’t able to take them all out, but I was able to take a lot out and basically recreate 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 contains a “good percentage” of the most popular Vine videos, but not a large portion of the long tail. For example, he says there were millions of K-pop-oriented videos that were never even archived.

“We have about 150,000 to 200,000 videos from about 60,000 creators,” he noted, adding that Vine originally had a few million users and a few million creators in comparison.

Vine creators, who still own the copyright to their work, can send diVine a DMCA takedown notice if they want their Vines removed, or they can verify that they are the account holder by proving that they still own the social media accounts originally listed in their Vine bio. (However, this process is not automated, so there may be a delay if a large number of creators try to do this at the same time.)

Once they get their account back, they can also choose to post new videos or upload their old content that was missed during the recovery process.

To verify that new video uploads are made by humans, Rabble uses technology from human rights organization The Guardian Projectwhich allows you to verify that the content was actually recorded on a smartphone, along with other checks.

And because it’s built on Nostr, a decentralized protocol that Dorsey prefers, and is open source, developers can 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 VC support, toxic business models or massive teams of engineers,” Jack Dorsey said in a provided statement. “The reason I fund the nonprofit, and Other Stuff, is to give creative engineers like Rabble the opportunity to show what’s possible in this new world, using permissionless protocols that can’t be shut down based on the whims of a business owner.”

Twitter/X’s current owner Elon Musk has also promised to bring back Vine after announcing in August that the company had discovered the old video archive. But nothing has been launched publicly yet. The Dorsey-backed diVine Project, meanwhile, believes that because the content comes from an online archive and the creators still own their copyrights, it is fair use.

Rabble also believes there is consumer demand for these types of non-AI, social experiences, despite the popularity of generative AI content and the widespread adoption of apps like OpenAI’s Sora and Meta AI.

“Companies see the involvement of AI and think people want this,” Rabble explains. “They’re confusing, like — yes, people are into it; yes, we use these things — but we also want control over our lives and over our social experiences. So I think there’s a nostalgia for the early Web 2.0 era, for the blogging era, for the era that gave us podcasting, the era where you built communities, instead of just gaming the algorithm,” he said.

DiVine is available on both iOS and Android at divine.video.