Twitter Co-Founder Jack Dorsey Funds the Launch of Vine Reboot diVine, Where AI Is Not Allowed

Photo Credit: diVine

Remember Vine? It’s back, and it’s called diVine, a new app from a developer of the original Vine and funding from Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey.

Vine is back in a big way. A new app launched with funding from Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey, diVine seeks to bring back the spirit of the original Vine app. Not only does it include videos from its predecessor, but AI-generated content is also not allowed.

The project is led by developer Evan Henshaw-Plath, better known as Rabble, who worked on the original Vine (and the original Twitter), and funding from Jack Dorsey’s non-profit, “and Other Stuff,” which formed in May.

Rabble said on Bluesky that their goal for diVine is that it’s open source, users control their own accounts, there’s no algorithm, users can run their own servers, and developers can’t shut it down. In this way, diVine is like Mastodon, built using a decentralized protocol (in diVine’s case, that protocol is Nostr; Mastodon uses ActivityPub).

“Nostr—the underlying open source protocol being used by diVine—is empowering developers to create a new generation of apps without the need for VC-backing, toxic business models or huge teams of engineers,” said Jack Dorsey. “The reason I funded the non-profit, and Other Stuff, is to allow creative engineers like Rabble to show what’s possible in this new world, by using permissionless protocols which can’t be shut down based on the whim of a corporate owner.”

Approximately 150,000 to 200,000 videos from around 60,000 creators from the original Vine were preserved on the platform, but millions of clips were lost—including many that were posted by K-pop stars. Creators from Vine still retain ownership of their work on the new platform and can file DMCA takedown requests or reclaim their content by verifying their old linked social profiles. Once verified using technology from the human rights non-profit the Guardian Project, they can repost any missing content or upload new videos.

More importantly, the new app isn’t just a trip down memory lane, and users are encouraged to create profiles and upload their own new Vine-like videos. But unlike traditional social media, which doesn’t always properly identify AI content, diVine promises to flag suspected generative AI content and prevent it from being posted.

It’s worth mentioning that Twitter’s current owner, Elon Musk, who rebranded the platform as X, has also promised to bring back Vine. He announced in August that the company had discovered Vine’s old video archive, which had been backed up by a group called the Archive Team in 2016; Rabble explored this archive to put Vine content on diVine, too. But nothing has been launched so far on Musk’s end.

Meanwhile, the diVine project believes that since the content is sourced from an online archive and creators still own their copyrights, it’s fair use. Rabble believes there’s ample consumer demand for this type of “traditional,” non-AI, social content—despite the increasing popularity of generative AI.

“Companies see the AI engagement and they think people want it,” Rabble told TechCrunch. “They’re confusing, like—yes, people engage with it; yes, we’re using these things—but we also want agency over our lives and over our social experiences. So I think there’s nostalgia for early Web 2.0 era, for the blogging era, for the era that gave us podcasting, the era that you were building communities instead of just gaming the algorithm.”

The diVine app is available to download on both iOS and Android on the app’s website—not yet on Google Play or Apple App stores, though that may change in the coming months.

Link to the source article – https://www.digitalmusicnews.com/2025/11/13/jack-dorsey-vine-reboot-divine/