Former Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey is funding a new mobile app called diVine. The app allows users to watch over 100,000 archived videos from now-defunct micro-video sharing app Vine, as well as create and upload new Vine-style videos.
The Twitter-owned video app Vine was shut down in 2016 after four years. Two years later, the short-lived Vine video archive also shut down. But since then, Vine’s cherished six-second upload continues to be shared and viewed on major social media platforms including TikTok, Instagram, and Facebook.
As AI-generated content becomes mainstream and social networks struggle to keep up with AI content warning activity, diVine’s creators say they will not post videos on the app that are suspected to have been created with generated AI.
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DiVine was funded by Dorsey’s nonprofit organization and Other Stuff and built by former Twitter employee and and Other Stuff member Evan Henshaw-Plath. He contributed to the Vine video archive in 2016.
According to a recent interview with TechCrunch, Henshaw-Plath’s impetus for building DiVine went beyond reintroducing Vine videos for public consumption. The developers wanted to launch a social video sharing platform that consisted entirely of videos created by real humans, rather than AI models.
DiVine is built on a decentralized protocol called Nostr, which, like BlueSky and Mastodon, allows developers to create their own apps and media servers.
To cancel AI uploads, the platform relies on technology owned by the Guardian Project, a human rights nonprofit that can verify whether the uploaded content was recorded on a real smartphone.
As for the archive, Henshaw-Plath told TechCrunch that more than 200,000 videos from around 60,000 original Vine creators have been archived, compared to the millions of videos that originally existed on the now-shutdown app.
Original creators can reclaim their Vine accounts, post new videos, upload old content, or request that their videos be removed from diVine’s archives through a DMCA removal request.
In a public statement, Dorsey wrote that he funded “other things” to help creative engineers like Henshaw-Plas work within open protocols that “cannot be shut down based on the whims of corporate owners.”
