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Vine returns as diVine: Jack Dorsey revives the viral short-video app

DiVine, a new app backed by former Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey, is bringing back more than 150,000 archived Vine videos.

Launched in 2012, Vine was one of the many apps that popularised short form videos. (Image Source: Vine)

Before TikTok and Instagram, Vine, a popular social media platform where people could post six-second-long videos, popularised short-form content. Introduced in 2012, Vine was owned by Twitter and shut down four years later. But now, diVine, a new app backed by Twitter’s ex-CEO Jack Dorsey, is bringing back more than 1,00,000 archived Vine videos from an old backup that was created before Vine’s shutdown.

According to TechCrunch, diVine won’t just let users access their archived Vine videos but also allow them to create profiles and upload new videos. But unlike AI-generated content on social media platforms like Twitter, Instagram and YouTube, diVine will actively flag suspected AI content and prevent users from posting it.

Funded by Jack Dorsey’s non-profit “and Other Stuff”, the organisation focuses on developing experimental open source projects amongst other tools. To give you a quick recap, back in 2017, Twitter had brought back some Vine videos on a website.

diVine is available on various platforms, including Android, iOS and web. (Image Source: diVine/TechCrunch)

To bring back Vine videos, Evan Henshaw-Plath, an early Twitter employee, said they accessed videos backed up by a group known as the Archive Team, a community that focuses on saving internet websites which are actively in danger of being lost. However, the group’s Vine backups were stored as large binary files, which were not appropriate for someone who just wanted to watch old Vine videos. To make it watchable, Jack Dorsey and team extract the backup’s content to serve as the base for the diVine app.

The publication goes on to say that a developer known as Rabble worked on bringing back things like user engagement, some original comments and even likes. The result was that he managed to recover somewhere between 1,50,000 and 2,00,000 videos by 60,000 creators.

If you had a Vine account, you can reclaim it by verifying ownership using social media accounts listed in your Vine bio. The app also lets you request content removal via DMCA. The app uses verification technology backed by the Guardian Project to distinguish between AI and human-generated content. DiVine is currently available on Android, iOS and the web.

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