Vine is back as diVine, and it completely bans AI videos

If you open TikTok or Reels today, you are inevitably met with a barrage of AI-generated narrations, deepfake skits, and relentless recommendation loops.

Now, someone is trying to take social media back in time, and Jack Dorsey is writing the checks.

Meet diVine, a new web-based revival of Vine, the beloved looping video platform that Twitter killed back in 2017. The passion project is led by early Twitter engineer Evan Henshaw-Plath, better known as Rabble, with backing from Dorsey’s non-profit, and Other Stuff.

Digging up 170,000 ghosts from 2017

The web beta of diVine is live right now. While there is no native mobile app yet, the site is designed around vertical looping clips meant for phone screens.

Instead of launching into an empty void, Rabble went digital archaeology hunting. Using archives from old Twitter data, he managed to recover around 170,000 original videos from the OG Vine era.

He is not stopping there. Rabble says he plans to restore millions of archived clips, including original profile pictures and comment sections, giving fans a functional time machine. Users can also record and upload their own new short clips right now.

Powered by Nostr, strictly no AI allowed

Beyond nostalgia, diVine is taking two very firm philosophical stances.

First, it runs on Nostr, the decentralized open social protocol that Dorsey has championed heavily over the past couple of years. Rabble also wants to introduce user-created algorithms down the road, ditching corporate black-box feeds.

Second, and perhaps most surprisingly, the platform is saying a hard no to generative AI videos. diVine claims it will focus solely on organic, human-made footage, positioning authenticity as its core differentiator.

Reviving Vine is not a new idea. Vine co-founder Dom Hofmann spent years building a sequel called Byte, which launched around spring 2019, though it never captured lightning in a bottle twice.

Why it matters

While every tech giant is rushing to flood their feeds with AI-generated video tools, diVine is betting that people are already burning out on synthetic junk.

For everyday creators and nostalgic scrollers, it is definitely worth visiting the web beta just to experience the weird, pre-algorithm internet again. But as a daily driver, the lack of an app and inevitable early bugs mean it is still an experiment, not a TikTok replacement.

We think the human-only branding is clever. As video-generating tools get hyper-realistic, authentic creative friction becomes a luxury good. Combining that pitch with Nostr gives privacy-conscious users an actual alternative.

That said, the hurdles are massive. Enforcing a strict ban on AI-generated media is notoriously difficult, and building an active creator economy on a decentralized protocol without corporate ad revenue has doomed projects like Byte in the past. It is a noble throwback, but nostalgia alone rarely pays the bills.