Jack Dorsey Funds diVine, a Vine Reboot That Includes Vine's Video Archive (techcrunch.com)
(Thursday November 13, 2025 @10:30PM (BeauHD)
from the valiant-efforts dept.)
- Reference: 0180067822
- News link: https://tech.slashdot.org/story/25/11/13/2247206/jack-dorsey-funds-divine-a-vine-reboot-that-includes-vines-video-archive
- Source link: https://techcrunch.com/2025/11/12/jack-dorsey-funds-divine-a-vine-reboot-that-includes-vines-video-archive/
An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch:
> As generative AI content starts to fill our social apps, a project to bring back Vine's six-second looping videos is [1]launching with Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey's backing . On Thursday, a new app called [2]diVine will give access to more than 100,000 archived Vine videos, restored from an older backup that was created before Vine's shutdown. The app won't just exist as a walk down memory lane; it will also allow users to create profiles and upload their own new Vine videos. However, unlike on traditional social media, where AI content is often haphazardly labeled, diVine will flag suspected generative AI content and prevent it from being posted.
According to TechCrunch, a volunteer preservation group called the Archive Team saved Vine's content when it shut down [3]in 2016 . The only problem was that everything was stored in massive 40-50 GB binary blob files that were basically unusable for casual viewing.
Evan Henshaw-Plath (who goes by the name Rabble), an early Twitter employee and member of Jack Dorsey's nonprofit "and Other Stuff," dug into those backup files to try and salvage as much as he could. He spent months writing big-data extraction scripts, reverse-engineering how the archived binaries were structured, and reconstructing the original video files, old user info, view counts, and more. "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 said.
Rabble estimates that through this process he was able to successfully recover 150,000-200,000 Vine videos from around 60,000 creators. diVine then rebuilt user profiles on top of the decentralized Nostr protocol so creators can reclaim their accounts, request takedowns, or upload missing videos.
You can check out the app for yourself at [4]diVine.video . It's available in beta form on both iOS and Android.
[1] https://techcrunch.com/2025/11/12/jack-dorsey-funds-divine-a-vine-reboot-that-includes-vines-video-archive/
[2] http://divine.video/
[3] https://news.slashdot.org/story/16/10/27/1855222/twitter-is-shutting-down-its-video-app-vine
[4] http://divine.video/
> As generative AI content starts to fill our social apps, a project to bring back Vine's six-second looping videos is [1]launching with Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey's backing . On Thursday, a new app called [2]diVine will give access to more than 100,000 archived Vine videos, restored from an older backup that was created before Vine's shutdown. The app won't just exist as a walk down memory lane; it will also allow users to create profiles and upload their own new Vine videos. However, unlike on traditional social media, where AI content is often haphazardly labeled, diVine will flag suspected generative AI content and prevent it from being posted.
According to TechCrunch, a volunteer preservation group called the Archive Team saved Vine's content when it shut down [3]in 2016 . The only problem was that everything was stored in massive 40-50 GB binary blob files that were basically unusable for casual viewing.
Evan Henshaw-Plath (who goes by the name Rabble), an early Twitter employee and member of Jack Dorsey's nonprofit "and Other Stuff," dug into those backup files to try and salvage as much as he could. He spent months writing big-data extraction scripts, reverse-engineering how the archived binaries were structured, and reconstructing the original video files, old user info, view counts, and more. "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 said.
Rabble estimates that through this process he was able to successfully recover 150,000-200,000 Vine videos from around 60,000 creators. diVine then rebuilt user profiles on top of the decentralized Nostr protocol so creators can reclaim their accounts, request takedowns, or upload missing videos.
You can check out the app for yourself at [4]diVine.video . It's available in beta form on both iOS and Android.
[1] https://techcrunch.com/2025/11/12/jack-dorsey-funds-divine-a-vine-reboot-that-includes-vines-video-archive/
[2] http://divine.video/
[3] https://news.slashdot.org/story/16/10/27/1855222/twitter-is-shutting-down-its-video-app-vine
[4] http://divine.video/
We're going to trust Dorsey again? (Score:2)
by ebunga ( 95613 )
No thanks.
Copyright (Score:2)
by Luthair ( 847766 )
The users would have granted Vine a right to distribute their work, but they definitely didn't grant Jack Dorky personally that right.
Off to a good start. (Score:3)
"Video unable to load"
Once upon a time I'd suspect it had been "slashdotted" , but I doubt Slashdot generates the sort of firehose of traffic it once did. Which means this things just fallen on its arse in normal traffic. Not a good way to launch a ..... startup... or whatever this is supposed to be?
The vine people must be pretty bitter they gave up the ghost and then a year or three later tiktok did more or less the exact same thing and turned into one of the biggest gen z sites on the planet.
Re: (Score:2)
Timing is everything.
Re: (Score:2)
Same. Getting "failed to load" on 95% of the videos on the feed.