SAN FRANCISCO, Nov 14 — Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey is resurrecting the iconic six-second looping videos of Vine with a clear mission: to create an authentic, human-only social experience.
The new app, called diVine, launched Thursday with a restored archive of over 100,000 classic Vine videos and will allow users to upload new content.
Crucially, it will use new technology to detect and block suspected generative AI content from being posted, according to TechCrunch
The project was financed by Dorsey’s nonprofit, “and Other Stuff,” and led by early Twitter employee Evan Henshaw-Plath (also known as “Rabble”). After discovering that a community project called the Archive Team had saved Vine’s content before its 2016 shutdown, Henshaw-Plath spent months writing scripts to reconstruct the massive data files into a usable library of videos, user profiles, and even some of the original comments.
The goal, Henshaw-Plath told TechCrunch, is to tap into a nostalgia for an earlier era of social media, before algorithms and AI dominated the user experience.
“Can we do something that takes us back?” he asked, reminiscing of a time when “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 new videos are human-made, diVine is using technology from the human rights nonprofit The Guardian Project to verify that content was recorded on a smartphone.
Original Vine creators can reclaim their restored accounts by verifying their identity through their old social media links. They can also request the removal of their content or upload old videos that the restoration process may have missed.
The app is built on Nostr, a decentralized protocol favoured by Dorsey.
“Nostr 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 statement, adding that such permissionless protocols “can’t be shut down based on the whim of a corporate owner.”
This stands in contrast to X owner Elon Musk, who promised to bring back Vine after discovering the old archives but has yet to launch anything.
You can try diVine here.
