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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.
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.