For a moment back there, Vine was the most fun place on the internet. The video sharing platform, which allowed looping videos of up to 6 seconds, was a haven for absurd humour, in a time before TikTok and Reels came along to infest our feeds with ads and slop. When the app shut down in 2017, it seemed like the end – but, in my favourite internet plot twist of 2025, it's back.
According to several reports, Jack Dorsey, founder of Twitter, is resurrecting Vine. And while it might feature a stupid new name, diVine, it does come with over 150,000 archived Vine clips reinstated. And best of all, AI is banned. Is this the Twitter alternative we've been waiting for?
The resurrection comes courtesy of and Other Stuff, Dorsey's non-profit organisation focussed on experimental open source projects.
In an interview with TechCrunch, early Twitter employee and developer of the new diVine app explains, "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?”
The team was able to salvage over 150k videos from an archive of a few million. But Henshaw-Plath says a “good percentage” of the most popular Vine videos are there. As long as the below clip, my all-time favourite, is there, I'm good.
To verify that clips aren't aI generated, the new app uses technology from the the Guardian Projec to confirm content was recorded on a smartphone. Explaining the focus on authenticity, Henshaw-Plath tells TechCrunch, "yes, we’re using [AI] — but we also want agency over our lives and over our social experiences. So 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.”
Indeed, with generative video models like Sora gaining the ability to create scarily realistic clips, and pretty much every announcement at Adobe Max 2025 being focussed on AI, nostalgia for a simpler time online is at an all time high. Slop is everywhere – including at the very top of Google, courtesy of its (often reliable) AI Overviews, and the internet of just ten years ago feels quaint in comparison.
Can a series of silly 6-second clips save us? Perhaps not – but if they offer a fleeting distraction from the Tilly Norwoods of this world, then I'm all for it.
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