• by Colin Kirkland , Yesterday

Former Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey is funding a new mobile app called “diVine” that will provide users with the ability to view over 100,000 archived videos from the now-defunct micro video-sharing app Vine, while also creating and uploading new Vine-style videos.

After four years, the Twitter-owned video app Vine was shut down in 2016. Two years later, a short-lived Vine video archive was also shuttered. However, since then, cherished Vine videos -- 6-second uploads -- continue to be shared and viewed on major social media platforms like TikTok, Instagram and Facebook.

As AI-generated content becomes mainstream, with social networks struggling to keep up with their AI-content flagging efforts, the creators of diVine have stated that videos that are suspected to be made with generative AI will not be posted to the app.

DiVine's creation was funded by Dorsey's nonprofit “and Other Stuff,” and built by former Twitter employee and “and Other Stuff” member Evan Henshaw-Plath, who played a part in archiving Vine videos in 2016.

According to his recent interview with TechCrunch, Henshaw-Plath's impetus to build diVine went beyond the reintroduction of Vine videos for public consumption. The developer wanted to launch a social video-sharing platform wholly made up of videos created by real human beings and not AI models.

DiVine is built on a decentralized protocol called Nostr, which, like on BlueSky or Mastodon, allows developers to create their own apps and media servers.

To cancel out AI uploads, the platform is utilizing technology owned by the Guardian Project, a human rights nonprofit that is able to check if uploaded content was recorded on a real smartphone.

In terms of the archive, Henshaw-Plath told TechCrunch that more than 200,000 videos from about 60,000 original Vine creators have been archived, compared to the millions of videos that originally populated the shuttered app.

Original creators can reclaim their Vine account, post new videos, upload old content, or request to have their videos taken down from diVine’s archive via a DMCA takedown request.

In a public statement, Dorsey writes that he funded “and Other Stuff” to help creative engineers like Henshaw-Plath work within open protocols that “can’t be shut down based on the whim of a corporate owner."