Twitter co-founder and blockchain evangelist Jack Dorsey has made good on his promise of reviving his much-missed, six-second video platform Vine — well, sort of.
As TechCrunch reports, the rebooted platform, dubbed diVine, will include over 100,000 archived videos from the platform, likely only a small fraction of the platform’s original database. Vine had over 200 million active monthly users in its heyday ten years ago, but was shut down in 2016.
But the reboot has a hidden ace up its sleeve: AI-generated content is banned outright, and any suspected use of AI will be flagged and prevented from being posted — a panacea for an internet that’s been overrun with lazy AI slop.
The old trove of Vine videos was painstakingly archived by a group called Archive Time, a “loose collective of rogue archivists, programmers, writers, and loudmouths dedicated to saving our digital heritage.”
Now, early Twitter employee Evan “Rabble” Henshaw-Plath, who works for Dorsey’s nonprofit “And Other Stuff,” led the charge to recreate the once-beloved video platform by carefully extracting this archive and making it available online once again.
“So basically, I’m like, can we do something that’s kind of nostalgic?” Henshaw-Plath told TechCrunch. “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?”
Henshaw-Plath’s description of a sentimental era when we didn’t have to deal with annoying AI slop is certainly a sign of the times. It’s a harsh reminder of how quickly the tech has invaded almost every aspect of our daily lives, clogging up our feeds with soulless and derivative garbage.
“Companies see the AI engagement and they think that people want it,” he added. “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 a nostalgia for the 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.”
Instead of allowing anybody to sign up for diVine, however, the new app is taking an interesting approach. The people behind the effort are prioritizing the some 60,000 creators whose videos they were able to save, allowing them to take possession of their Vine accounts once more and even post new videos.
But generative AI content is strictly verboten. Henshaw-Plath adopted tech from the human rights nonprofit, the Guardian Project, to verify if a video was recorded on a smartphone, according to TechCrunch.
The new app is also entirely built on an open source protocol called Nostr, “empowering developers to create a new generation of apps without the need for VC-backing, toxic business models or huge teams of engineers,” Dorsey said in a statement to TechCrunch.
Interest in the project has been immense so far.
“Well, that was fast, we had 10k people join the divine.video testflight in four hours,” Hensawh-Plath tweeted Thursday afternoon.
While it’s available on Android, don’t expect diVine to land on Apple’s App Store any time soon.
“Apple is being typically frustrating and clueless with its App Store reviews,” Hensawh-Plath wrote in a separate post. “Just got rejected again.”
There could be rough waters ahead. X-formerly-Twitter owner Elon Musk already promised to bring back Vine’s archive in August — so when he catches wind of diVine, it wouldn’t be shocking if he tried to shut it down.
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