Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey is backing a project to reboot the nostalgic six-second looping videos of Vine through a new project called diVine. This provides access to over 10,000 archived Vine videos. The clips were restored from an older backup that was created before Vine’s shutdown. The diVine platform lets users create profiles and post their own new Vine videos.
Jack Dorsey funds the diVine project, a reboot of Vine
Vine’s reboot as diVine is backed by Jack Dorsey’s nonprofit organization, “and Other Stuff.” This effort focuses on funding experimental open-source projects and other tools that may revolutionize the social media landscape. Evan Henshaw-Path (aka Rabble), a former Twitter employee, and members of “and Other Stuff” played a key role in the birth of diVine.
They have explored the Vine archive after its shutdown in 2016. A group called the Archive Team backed up its videos. The group had saved Vine’s content as large 40GB-60GB binary files, which weren’t accessible to anyone. The fact that the archive existed led Henshaw-Plath to explore whether it was possible to extract the old Vine content to serve as the basis for a new Vine-like app.
Henshaw-Plath took some time to write big data scripts and reconstruct them along with the information on the old Vine users and the user engagement with the videos, such as views and comments. He was able to extract a significant number of popular videos. Henshaw-Plath believes that the app has a “good percentage” of popular Vine videos. There were around 150,000 to 200,000 clips from about 60,000 creators.
The platform will block AI content
Vine creators, who hold copyright to their work, can send a DMCA takedown request if they want their Vines removed. They can verify their account ownership by showing they still have access to the social media accounts linked to their Vine bio. Once done, they can post videos or upload old content.
Unlike the traditional social media apps, diVine will flag generative AI content and prevent it from going online. To verify that the new uploads are human-made, Henshaw-Plath is using technology from the Guardian Project, a human rights nonprofit. This will help verify that the content is real.
Elon Musk, in August, announced he’ll bring back Vine. However, there’s been no public announcement yet. Meanwhile, the diVine project believes that, because the content is from an online archive and creators still have copyrights, this is fair use. The new diVine is available for both iOS and Android at diVine.video.
