When Twitter, now X, shut down Vine in 2017, users thought its six-second videos were gone forever—but now, the former CEO who shuttered the app is helping bring them back.
Jack Dorsey, the former Twitter chief and now CEO (or Blockhead) at payments company Block, is supporting a Vine reboot app called diVine that plans to bring back 10,000 archived videos from the defunct platform once thought lost to the world. The new app, which is being funded by Dorsey’s nonprofit “and Other Stuff,” will also take a strong stance against the AI-generated content that has started to proliferate across the web, with special filters to prevent AI posts.
The Vine reboot effort may also beat Elon Musk to the punch. The world’s richest man and X owner said in August the company was working on opening user access to the archive of Vine videos that it has, which was once thought to be deleted—although it’s unclear if Musk’s claim will amount to anything.
X did not immediately respond to Fortune’s request for comment.
diVine is being spearheaded by Evan Henshaw-Plath, also known by his longtime online persona Rabble, whose relationship with Dorsey goes back to Odeo, a podcasting app from which Twitter spun out as a side project. Part of the vision of making the diVine app, he told TechCrunch,was to take the tech back to the pre-AI, web 2.0 days for the sake of nostalgia.
“So basically, I’m like, can we do something that’s kind of nostalgic?” he said. “Can we do something that takes us back, that lets us see those old things, but also lets us see an era of social media where you could either have control of your algorithms, or you could choose who you follow, and it’s just your feed, and where you know that it’s a real person that recorded the video?”
Through a couple of months of research and coding, Henshaw-Plath was able to extract a “good percentage” of the most popular Vine videos and their associated user accounts by digging through an archive made at the time of its shutdown by an archiving group appropriately called the Archive Team, which aims to preserve websites at risk of disappearing.
Previous Vine users who see their videos revived can also claim their old accounts by proving they still have access to the social media accounts listed in their dead Vine profiles. They can also request they be taken down.
The rebooted app is being hosted by an open-source decentralized protocol backed by Dorsey called Nostr, which he said puts diVine above the need for venture capitalists, toxic business models, or large engineering teams. This time, Vine’s videos will not be lost to history, he added.
“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,” Dorsey said in a statement to TechCrunch.
