Vine is back! …sort of. Recently, Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey announced the launch of a new short-form video-sharing app that includes an archive of videos posted on the original Vine app.

Restoring Vine

Aptly named “diVine,” the beta version of the app was released on November 14, 2025, thanks to funding from Dorsey’s new nonprofit, “and Other Stuff.” Although Vine has been off the App Store for nearly a decade, a group known as the Archive Team, which backs up websites “in danger of being lost,” managed to create a binary backup of Vine’s content before it was shut down in 2017. Miraculously, the team at diVine was able to access and restore some of the videos saved in that backup and incorporate them into the new platform.

Now, over 100,000 of the original videos are viewable once more, and even include original view counts, engagement numbers, and some original comments. As part of the restoration process, the diVine developers also reconstructed profiles for some of the most popular Viners, who can gain access to their new accounts by proving their identity. They can also submit content removal requests if they wish for their past uploads to remain inaccessible, and standard users can set up new accounts where they can create and upload entirely new content.

The diVine design

Not only was diVine primarily designed as an alternative to the algorithmic-led apps currently populating the social media landscape, but it also aims to provide users with a “non-AI social experience.” The original Vine app did have a curated “For You” page, but the homepage was never algorithm-based – and diVine follows this model, giving users more control over what they see. Evan Henshaw-Plath, a diVine employee (and former Twitter employee) recently stated:

“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… So basically, I’m like, can we do something that’s kind of nostalgic? 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?”

Additionally, unlike most mainstream social media apps, diVine was developed using an open-source, decentralized protocol called Nostr. As Dorsey recently explained,

“Nostr — the underlying open source protocol being used by diVine — is empowering developers to create a new generation of apps without the need for VC-backing, toxic business models or huge teams of engineers… The reason I funded the non-profit, ‘and Other Stuff,’ is to allow creative engineers like [Evan Henshaw-Plath] to show what’s possible in this new world, by using permissionless protocols which can’t be shut down based on the whim of a corporate owner.”

Although the beta-version of diVine is currently closed to new users, you can sign up to be notified when the app goes fully live.