News

Dorsey-Backed diVine Brings Back Vine’s Looping Videos

The reboot pulls 100,000-plus clips from a salvaged archive and adds strict checks to block AI-made posts.

Published

7 months ago

November 13, 2025

dorsey-backed divine brings back vine's looping videos

diVine has gone live with a rebuilt trove of classic Vine loops and fresh funding from Jack Dorsey. The app restores more than 100,000 six-second videos from the Vine archive and reopens a format that disappeared when Twitter shut Vine down in 2016.

The recovery almost didn’t happen. Archive Team volunteers scraped the site ahead of its closure but stored the material in huge binary dumps that were effectively unusable. Evan Henshaw-Plath (an early Twitter engineer who’s now working with Dorsey’s new nonprofit and Other Stuff) spent months cracking those files and stitching user data back together. He says the result captures most of Vine’s best-known clips, though millions of niche posts were never archived.

Creators retain their copyrights. They can request takedowns or reclaim profiles by proving control of the accounts linked in their old bios. Once verified, they can upload missing videos or post new ones.

diVine isn’t pitching nostalgia alone. The app lets users shoot fresh six-second loops but runs each upload through checks from the Guardian Project to confirm a clip was recorded on a real phone. Suspected AI content is blocked. That stance stands out as generative video races across major social platforms.

The service runs on Nostr, the decentralized protocol Dorsey has pushed as an alternative to corporate-controlled feeds. “Nostr — the underlying open source protocol being used by diVine — is empowering developers to create a new generation of apps without the need for VC-backing, toxic business models or huge teams of engineers,” Dorsey said.

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Meanwhile, Henshaw-Plath sees a simple demand: spaces where the feed is human. “Yes, people engage with [AI] … but we also want agency over our lives and over our social experiences,” he said.

For users in the Middle East and elsewhere watching automated content flood their timelines, diVine marks a return to a lean format that once defined early mobile video — now rebuilt on open tech and a bet that authenticity still matters.

News

LUVED Is A New Curated Preloved Marketplace For The UAE

Sellers keep 100 percent of every sale and AI can build a listing in five seconds — though the app’s smartest tools are still coming.

Published

1 day ago

June 16, 2026

Joanna Melki

luved is a new curated preloved marketplace for the uae

Secondhand shopping has become mainstream in the UAE, but the experience is still scattered across resale sites, social media and informal group chats. LUVED, a mobile-first marketplace that launched in Dubai this month, is betting it can pull that activity into one place — and that the thing buyers and sellers actually want is not more inventory, but trust.

The app trades in what it calls circular luxury: preloved fashion and lifestyle pieces across men’s, women’s and children’s categories, bought, sold or given away peer to peer. Its main pitch is economics, with sellers keeping 100 percent of every sale under a zero-commission, fast payout model, while buyers are promised vetted pieces at lower prices.

Where LUVED is staking its reputation is verification. Sellers pass a KYC check, and items run through a two-layer authentication system powered by Entrupy that pairs instant AI screening with human expert review for high-value pieces. Authenticity certificates travel with each item, payments sit in escrow, and a buyer-protection package the company calls The Safety Net adds a 48-hour return window and dispute resolution. Door-to-door logistics removes the in-person meetups that make most resale deals awkward.

An in-app assistant called Luvbot — offering selling insights and demand-based recommendations — is soon to be introduced to the platform. Other features include autofill and dynamic pricing that lets users build a listing in as little as five seconds from three photos, plus a swipe-based feed, story-style drops and in-app chat in English and Arabic. Finally, a gifting layer, Luved & Gifted, lets users pass items to others inside the app rather than sell them.

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“After moving to Dubai, I saw how difficult it was to sell or even give things away,” says founder and CEO Shaima Sibtain. The friction is real, and so is the competition. In resale, trust is won transaction by transaction — and that is the test LUVED has set itself.

The app is live on the App Store now, with Google Play to follow. The company also plans to expand across the region, which will be the real test for a marketplace staking everything on trust.