Vine, the short-form video platform that helped shape a generation of internet culture, has been resurrected — though not by the company that killed it.
On Thursday (Nov. 13), diVine launched as a nostalgia-driven reboot of the original six-second app, funded by Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey through his nonprofit collective, and Other Stuff. The new platform leans heavily into the iconography and ethos of Vine while positioning itself as a counter-movement to today’s algorithmic, AI-saturated feeds.
DiVine’s pitch is straightforward: real people, real videos, real brevity. The app will host more than 100,000 archived Vines pulled from backups preserved before the platform’s 2017 shutdown, making it one of the largest public restorations of a lost social network to date. Users can also create profiles and upload their own new six-second clips, but with one major rule: absolutely no AI content.
“Experience the raw, unfiltered creativity of real people sharing genuine moments in 6-second loops. Built on decentralized technology, owned by no one, controlled by everyone,” the diVine website declares, signaling the project’s philosophical departure from the algorithm-driven, corporate-owned social apps that dominate today’s attention economy.
The revival was spearheaded by Evan Henshaw-Plath — known as Rabble — an early Twitter employee and member of ‘and Other Stuff’. After discovering that the Archive Team had saved Vine’s content as massive, unwieldy binary files, Rabble spent months decrypting and reconstructing them, along with metadata like views, engagement, and even a subset of comments.
“I wasn’t able to get all of them out, but I was able to get a lot out and basically reconstruct these Vines and these Vine users, and give each person a new user [profile] on this open network,” he told TechCrunch. He estimates diVine now preserves around 150,000 to 200,000 videos from roughly 60,000 creators, which is a meaningful slice of Vine’s cultural core, though not the full spectrum. Entire categories, such as millions of K-pop Vines, were never archived in the first place.
Rabble’s motivation wasn’t just archival; it was ideological. “So basically, I’m like, can we do something that’s kind of nostalgic?” he said. “Can we do something that takes us back, that lets us see those old things, but also lets us see an era of social media where you could either have control of your algorithms, or you could choose who you follow, and it’s just your feed, and where you know that it’s a real person that recorded the video?”
To ensure those videos are real, diVine is using verification tech from the Guardian Project, a human rights–focused organization that helps authenticate smartphone-captured media. If content appears to be AI-generated, the system will flag it and block the upload entirely.
Jack Dorsey framed diVine not as a nostalgic vanity project, but as a demonstration of what decentralized, open-source tech can enable. “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 in a provided statement.
“The reason I funded the non-profit, and Other Stuff, is to allow creative engineers like Rabble to show what’s possible in this new world, by using permission-less protocols which can’t be shut down based on the whim of a corporate owner.”
That comment lands with extra weight given Twitter/X’s own history with Vine, which the company abruptly sunsetted in 2016. Elon Musk has teased efforts to revive Vine under X, claiming the platform recently “found” the archive — but nothing has materialized. DiVine, meanwhile, is already live, banking on fair-use protections since creators still own their copyrights and can reclaim or remove their videos via DMCA requests.
The project is also tapping into a cultural desire for analog-feeling digital spaces — the kind that existed before feeds became growth-hacked and algorithmically gamed. “Companies see the AI engagement and they think that people want it,” Rabble said. “They’re confusing, like — yes, people engage with it; yes, we’re using these things — but we also want agency 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 that you were building communities, instead of just gaming the algorithm.”
DiVine is currently available for iOS and Android (via apk) at diVine.video. It’s a promise of a platform built not for virality, but human creativity — bite-sized, lo-fi, and unmistakably human. And we cannot wait to experience it.
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