diVine, launched this week on iOS and Android, allows you to review more than 100,000 Vines saved at the last minute from an old backup made before the service was closed. This resurrection is supported by “and Other Stuff”, the foundation created by Jack Dorsey in May 2025. Its objective is to finance experimental and open source projects capable, according to the former boss of Twitter, “ to outline a new generation of apps without depending on toxic economic models ».
No time to get bored with six-second videos
To rebuild Vine, Evan Henshaw-Plath — former Twitter employee and Dorsey’s traveling companion — aka Rabble, delved into the Archive Team archives. This collective, independent of Archive.org, had recovered gigabytes of data when the closure was announced. Problem: everything was stored in huge 40-50 GB binary files, impossible to view.
Rabble spent several months writing scripts to dissect these files, extract the videos, metadata, some of the comments and reconstruct the original user profiles. “ I couldn’t get everything, but a good portion of the most popular Vines », he summarizes at TechCrunch. Result: between 150,000 and 200,000 videos from around 60,000 creators are now available. Far from the millions of users that Vine had at its peak, but more than enough to awaken a collective memory.
Creators retain their rights: they can request a takedown via a DMCA request or reinstate their account by proving that they still control the identifiers mentioned in their original bio. Once reconnected, they can post new videos or re-upload missing ones. DiVine doesn’t just want to make something new out of something old. The platform introduces a strict rule: no AI-generated content is allowed. The app automatically detects suspicious videos and blocks their publication. To ensure that a clip was filmed by a human, Rabble relies on technology from the Guardian Project, a collective specializing in verifying content filmed on smartphones.
The infrastructure is also based on Nostr, a decentralized protocol popular with Jack Dorsey. Each developer can create their own application, manage their servers or offer variations, without depending on a central company. “ Nostr allows you to develop apps without VC, without toxic models, without armies of engineers “, boasts Dorsey. A way to stand out from X/Twitter, where Elon Musk also promises a return of Vine… without having launched anything so far.
Beyond technology, diVine is part of an assumed desire to reconnect with the Internet before all-powerful algorithms. “ People are using AI, but they also want to maintain control over their social experiences », Estimates Rabble. According to him, a new app that focuses on authenticity and simplicity could appeal to an audience tired of automatically generated feeds.
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