Vine Returns 🔥: A Hopeful, Authentic Rebellion 🚀

World News

Fueled by a nostalgic desire to revive the charm of Vine, a new app, diVine, is launching. Co-founded by Jack Dorsey, diVine offers users access to over 100,000 restored Vine videos, pulled from a backup created before the platform’s shutdown. However, diVine is more than just a trip down memory lane; it’s a space where users can create profiles and share their own videos. Recognizing the rise of AI-generated content, the team is proactively working to flag and prevent it from being posted. Spearheaded by Evan Henshaw-Plath, a former Twitter employee and member of Dorsey’s nonprofit, “and Other Stuff,” the project began with exploring the Vine archive, which had been preserved by the Archive Team. Initially, this archive’s content was stored as massive 40-50 GB files, creating a challenging viewing experience. Henshaw-Plath, known as “Rabble,” saw an opportunity: could they extract this content and rebuild it into a new app? Rabble and his team spent months developing scripts to decipher the files, meticulously reconstructing the Vines and the profiles of the original Vine users, alongside data on their engagement – views, comments, and more. They were able to recover a significant portion of the most popular videos, bringing together around 150,000 to 200,000 Vines from approximately 60,000 creators – a fraction of Vine’s original user base. To ensure authenticity, diVine utilizes technology from the human rights organization, the Guardian Project, to verify that new video uploads were actually filmed on a smartphone. Built on the open-source, decentralized protocol Nostr, diVine allows developers to create their own apps and services, offering users a level of control and transparency reminiscent of Vine’s early days. Creators can request the removal of their content via DMCA takedown requests, and the team is actively working to establish a system for verifying account ownership. The underlying technology is truly exciting – it’s giving developers the freedom to build brand-new apps without needing venture capital or relying on traditional, often problematic, business models. As Jack Dorsey put it, the goal is to empower creative engineers, like those at Rabble, to demonstrate what’s possible with these new, open protocols that can’t be controlled by a single company. Many people crave more control over their lives and social experiences, a longing for the early days of Web 2.0, like the era of blogging and podcasts – a time when communities thrived before algorithms took over. You can find diVine on both iOS and Android at diVine.video.