Former Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey is backing the relaunched app that includes more than 100,000 archived Vine videos.
SAN FRANCISCO — Vine is back — sort of.
Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey revealed to TechCrunch this week he has been quietly funding a reboot of the beloved six-second video platform. The relaunched app, called diVine, launched in beta this week with more than 100,000 archived videos from the original app.
Vine, which once boasted more than 200 million active monthly users, shut down in 2017 as Twitter, now known as X, struggled financially. The app’s six-second looping videos helped launch the careers of numerous internet personalities and became a cultural phenomenon that eventually led to video platforms like TikTok.
The new project was spearheaded by Evan Henshaw-Plath, known online as Rabble, an early Twitter employee who worked with Dorsey. He spent months extracting videos from an archive created when Vine shut down and has reconstructed between 150,000 and 200,000 videos from roughly 60,000 creators, along with user profiles, view counts and some original comments.
The new platform, backed by Dorsey’s nonprofit “and Other Stuff,” takes a deliberately retro approach to social media. It bans AI-generated content entirely and runs on a decentralized protocol, aiming to recapture an era when social feeds weren’t dominated by algorithms and artificial intelligence.
“So basically, I’m like, can we do something that’s kind of nostalgic?” Henshaw-Plath told TechCrunch. “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?”
The platform’s anti-AI stance is enforced through verification technology from the Guardian Project, a human rights nonprofit. The system checks whether videos were actually recorded on a smartphone rather than generated by artificial intelligence.
Original Vine creators who still own the copyright to their work can reclaim their accounts by proving they still control the social media profiles listed in their old Vine bios. Once verified, they can post new videos or upload old content that wasn’t captured in the restoration process. Creators can also request that their videos be removed through DMCA takedown notices.
The reboot comes as Elon Musk, the current owner of X, formerly Twitter, has also promised to revive Vine. Musk announced in August that his company had discovered the old video archive, but no public launch has materialized.
The app is currently available as a beta on iOS through TestFlight and as an Android APK download.