6 seconds of fame are back: Vine just got a resurrection

Once upon a time, Vine was the biggest craze in the looping-video scene. It was a six-second playground that turned everyday moments into endlessly replayable cultural snapshots. While Vine may have vanished years ago, its comeback is arriving from an unexpected place. Jack Dorsey, the co-founder of Twitter, the very company that shut Vine down, is now backing diVine, a reboot that restores part of the original archive and brings six-second looping videos back to life.

diVine works much like the original: You sign up, scroll through looping videos, or upload your own six-second clips. Thanks to the backups of the Archive Team, a group dedicated to preserving online content, tens of thousands of original Vines, along with comments, have been recovered. Creators from the old era can reclaim their accounts, while newcomers can jump in fresh.

But this reboot isn’t just a nostalgia trip. diVine is taking a firm stance on human-made content. AI-generated videos are either flagged or rejected entirely. To enforce that, the platform uses tech from the Guardian Project, which is a human-rights non-profit known for verifying media authenticity, to check whether clips came from real smartphone cameras instead of AI pipelines. The other twist is structural: diVine is built on Nostr, a decentralized protocol that emphasizes openness, user control, and fewer algorithmic black boxes.

Why does any of this matter in 2025? Because the short-form video world is overflowing with TikTok clones, algorithm-tweaked feeds, and AI-generated clips that all start to blur together. diVine’s pitch is the opposite. A tiny, creator-centric space where “real videos from real people” can shine without algorithm churn.

For those of you who remember, Elon Musk also said that he’s reviving Vine for X, but with an AI twist. His version will reportedly lean into AI-generated looping videos, which is the exact philosophical opposite of what diVine is trying to be. It sets up an unusual showdown of human Vine versus AI Vine. One brings back the vibe of 2013, the other wants to remix it using synthetic creativity.

It’s also important to note that diVine’s archive is incomplete. When Twitter announced Vine’s shutdown in 2016 and pulled the plug, most of the original data was destined to disappear. Fortunately, Evan Henshaw-Plath (an early Twitter employee, aka Rabble) worked with Archive Team volunteers to rescue a large snapshot. In a conversation with News, he estimates diVine has a “good percentage” of the most popular Vine content, but many clips are still gone. Also, for the available content, creators still own their copyrights. As such, they can contact the platform to verify their old accounts or request takedowns.

For viewers and creators today, diVine is basically a second chance, a place to revisit the chaotic, looping humor of 2013-2016 or try making your own six-second hits in 2025. Whether it can recreate Vine’s lightning-in-a-bottle moment, or whether Musk’s AI-powered reboot will steal the spotlight, is anyone’s guess. But for now, diVine represents something rare in modern social media: a nostalgic revival with a very intentional, human-first stance.