Jack Dorsey Backs diVine App Reviving Vine Archive

A new app called diVine, backed by Twitter cofounder Jack Dorsey, launched on Thursday, offering access to more than 150,000 archived six-second videos from the original Vine platform, which Twitter shut down in 2016. The mobile application, available on iOS, Android, and the web at divine.video, allows users to browse the restored content, create profiles, and upload new short-form videos while enforcing strict measures to block generative AI-generated material.

The project revives a portion of Vine's digital legacy through an archive preserved by the Archive Team, a volunteer collective dedicated to safeguarding internet content at risk of disappearance. After Vine's closure, the group downloaded videos and related data into large binary files totaling 40 to 60 gigabytes each. Evan Henshaw-Plath, an early Twitter employee known as Rabble and now working with Dorsey's nonprofit and Other Stuff, spent months developing custom scripts to decode these files. His efforts reconstructed videos, user profiles, view counts, and a subset of comments, focusing on popular content from about 60,000 creators. Not all material was recoverable; for example, millions of niche videos, such as...