DiVine: Everything We Know About The Vine Reboot
Vine, the six-second video phenomenon that surged in popularity in 2013, is making a comeback with a major revamp. As first reported by Yahoo News and TechCrunch, former Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey—who ultimately shut the app down in 2017—is now supporting a reboot. The new project, called diVine, aims to revive a trove of original Vine clips and give the classic platform a second life.
What will diVine allow users to do?
The app is being built by Evan Henshaw-Plath, known as Rabble, and is being financed through Jack Dorsey’s nonprofit, “and Other Stuff.” diVine plans to restore roughly 10,000 archived videos from the original service, while giving Vine’s former creators the option to reclaim their accounts or request takedowns of their old posts.
diVine will also allow users to create new profiles and let people upload brand-new Vine-style videos to keep the spirit of the app going. Notably, as social media platforms struggle with safety protocols surrounding AI, diVine has already put proper safety guidelines in place to protect users. Unlike mainstream social platforms—where AI-generated media is often poorly labeled—diVine will automatically identify suspected AI-generated clips and block them from being uploaded.
The team also intends to introduce protective filters that keep AI-created content off the platform entirely, evoking what they describe as a return to an earlier, more human era of social media.
Jack Dorsey told TechCrunch he established his nonprofit to support engineers building projects that won’t be shut down “based on the whim of a corporate owner.” diVine will rely on Dorsey’s decentralized protocol, Nostr, to ensure it operates independently of corporate control.
Vine originally launched in 2012, created by Rus Yusupov, Dom Hofmann, and Colin Kroll. Twitter acquired the startup for $30 million and released it publicly the following year. Its six-second looping videos—usually comedic bits or quick slices of everyday life—helped launch the careers of major internet figures like Shawn Mendes and Logan Paul. But by 2017, slowing growth and monetization challenges led to the platform’s closure.
Elon Musk, who purchased Twitter and rebranded it as X, has also teased a revival of Vine in a different form. In July, he claimed Vine would make a return to X, but only “in ‘AI form.’” Back in 2022, he ran a poll asking users whether Vine should come back; more than 69% of 4.9 million voters said yes, according to Yahoo News.
How was diVine made?
To build the new app, Henshaw-Plath dug into the Vine archives. When Twitter announced the platform’s shutdown in 2016, a group called the Archive Team backed up the videos. The Archive Team, an independent community-run preservation collective, stored Vine’s library in massive 40–50 GB binary files—making them difficult to use or browse.
The existence of these unwieldy archives inspired Rabble to see if the old clips could be extracted and restored for a modern Vine-like app.
“So basically, I’m like, can we do something that’s kind of nostalgic?” he told TechCrunch in an interview published Nov. 13. “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?”
He spent months writing data-processing scripts to reverse-engineer the backups, ultimately reconstructing many Vines, along with user information, view counts, and a portion of the original 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 explained.
Rabble estimates the restored library represents a “good percentage” of Vine’s most iconic clips, though many of the more obscure ones were too difficult to recover.
Creators still hold the copyright to their original videos. They can request removal through a DMCA notice or verify their identity by proving ownership of the social media accounts linked in their old Vine bios. Because this isn’t automated, diVine may experience delays if many creators make requests simultaneously. Once verified, creators will regain access to their accounts and may post new content or re-upload any of their Vine clips that weren’t recovered in the archival process.
Would you join diVine? Tell us in the comments section.
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