Vine is widely remembered as a cultural phenomenon. Its six-second looping video format launched the careers of people like Shawn Mendes, Logan Paul, and King Bach before Twitter discontinued the app in 2016 and fully shut it down a year later.
For a brief period, the website remained as a static archive where you could watch old videos. But even that was later taken down, leaving its legacy scattered across thousands of YouTube compilation videos.
If you miss the creative chaos of the old platform, there is some good news: Divine, a new social media app backed by Jack Dorsey, Twitter co-founder, is here to fill the void. It includes an actual backup of Vine"s video archive, which is about 40-50GB in size, restored from files saved by volunteer archivists before the original service went dark for good.
This new app is the work of Evan Henshaw-Plath, an early Twitter employee who now works with Dorsey"s "and Other Stuff" non-profit.
Henshaw-Plath spent months writing scripts to reconstruct the old videos, user profiles, and even some comments from the massive binary files saved by the Archive Team. He managed to recover about 150,000 to 200,000 videos from around 60,000 creators.
Apart from breathing life into a library of classic videos, Divine allows you to create an account and post your own six-second clips. The team has also included a Hashtag Explorer and Search functionality. Original Vine creators can reclaim their accounts by verifying ownership through social media accounts that were listed in their old bios.
The Divine team says it is bringing Vine back because it wants to preserve a unique creative culture from a pre-AI internet. The app has a ProofMode that the team says will "help you distinguish real camera captures from AI-generated content." It works by adding cryptographic proofs to videos, including device hardware information and digital signatures, to confirm a video"s authenticity.
In January this year, Elon Musk stated that his team was "looking into" bringing the platform back. Then in July, the businessman announced he was "bringing back Vine, but in AI form."
Divine is available for Android, iOS, and the web. If you want, you can check out the source code for the whole platform on GitHub.
Via: TechCrunch