SAN FRANCISCO — Vine has made a comeback—at least in spirit.

In a recent interview with TechCrunch, Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey disclosed his involvement in financing a revival of the much-loved six-second video app. The new platform, aptly named diVine, has launched in its beta phase this week, showcasing more than 100,000 archived videos from the original Vine collection.

Vine was once a giant in the social media landscape, boasting over 200 million monthly active users before its closure in 2017 due to financial woes faced by its parent company, Twitter, now rebranded as X. Vine’s brief, looping video format not only captivated a global audience but also propelled many internet stars to fame, paving the way for video-sharing platforms like TikTok.

The revival effort is led by Evan Henshaw-Plath, also known as Rabble, who was among the early employees at Twitter working alongside Dorsey. He dedicated months to extracting videos from an archive saved at Vine’s shutdown, successfully reconstructing between 150,000 to 200,000 videos from about 60,000 original creators. These videos retain user profiles, view counts, and even some of the initial comments.

Supported by Dorsey’s nonprofit organization “and Other Stuff,” diVine embraces a distinctly vintage approach to social networking. It prohibits AI-generated content altogether and operates on a decentralized protocol, striving to bring back the days when social media feeds were free from the influence of algorithms and artificial intelligence.

“So basically, I’m like, can we do something that’s kind of nostalgic?” Henshaw-Plath told TechCrunch. “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?”

The platform’s anti-AI stance is enforced through verification technology from the Guardian Project, a human rights nonprofit. The system checks whether videos were actually recorded on a smartphone rather than generated by artificial intelligence.

Original Vine creators who still own the copyright to their work can reclaim their accounts by proving they still control the social media profiles listed in their old Vine bios. Once verified, they can post new videos or upload old content that wasn’t captured in the restoration process. Creators can also request that their videos be removed through DMCA takedown notices.

The reboot comes as Elon Musk, the current owner of X, formerly Twitter, has also promised to revive Vine. Musk announced in August that his company had discovered the old video archive, but no public launch has materialized.

The app is currently available as a beta on iOS through TestFlight and as an Android APK download.