Twitter co-founder backs vine reboot ‘diVine' with trove of archived clips

In a direct challenge to the rising tide of AI-generated content, a new app named, diVine is launching with the financial backing of Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey, focusing on resurrecting the spirit of the beloved six-second video platform, Vine.

The project backed by Dorsey’s nonprofit “and Other Stuff,” will not grant users access to a restored archive of over 100,000 classic Vine videos but will also enable them to create and share new, human-made content.

A key tenet of the new platform is its staunch opposition to generative AI. The app will help to detect AI-generated videos from being posted.

The revival was headed by Evan Henshaw-Plath, an early Twitter employee known as Rabble, who now works for Dorsey’s nonprofit.

The attempt was initiated when he discovered that the video content from Vine, which Twitter shut down in 2016, had been preserved in massive data files by the volunteer-based Archive Team.

“I’m like, can we do something that’s kind of nostalgic?” Rabble told TechCrunch. “Can we do something that… lets us see an era of social media where… you know that it’s a real person that recorded the video?”

Rabble spent months writing scripts to parse the archived data, successfully reconstructing around 150,000 to 200,000 videos from about 60,000 original creators, complete with view counts and a subset of original comments.

Original Vine creators will retain copyrights and can ask for takedowns or reclaiming their profiles to upload new videos or missing old ones.

To make sure that new uploads are authentic, diVine will utilise verification technology from the human rights nonprofit the Guardian Project to confirm videos were recorded on a smartphone.

The app is designed on a decentralized protocol championed by Dorsey, making it open-source and resistant to corporate control.

“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. He funded the nonprofit to allow engineers like Rabble “to show what’s possible in this new world.”

With the launch of diVine, a fascinating rivalry is created as X (formerly twitter) owner Elon Musk has also repeatedly promised to revive Vine on his platform. But for now, the Dorsey-backed project will revive the internet nostalgia back to users.