For those who feel nostalgic for the vibrant, community-driven social media landscape that flourished during the latter years of the Obama presidency, a surprising revival is on the horizon. The spirit of Vine—the iconic six-second video app that once defined a generation’s sense of humor and digital creativity—is being reimagined and brought back to life in a decentralized form called DiVine. Supported by Jack Dorsey, cofounder of both Twitter and the financial technology company Block, DiVine represents an ambitious attempt to merge nostalgia, technological innovation, and philosophical resistance to the corporate enclosures that now define much of online interaction.
At the center of this reinvention stands Evan Henshaw-Plath, better known by his pseudonym Rabble. A former early Twitter engineer who collaborated closely with Dorsey, Rabble has long championed open-source movements and community-driven technology. For him, DiVine is not a sentimental exercise aimed merely at reviving fleeting moments of viral silliness. Rather, it serves as both a tribute to the unpolished authenticity that once characterized Internet exchange and a coded protest against what he calls the “walled gardens” of modern tech platforms—digital ecosystems dominated by secretive recommendation systems and machine-curated feeds. These algorithmic structures increasingly determine what users see, hear, and create, often substituting human originality with synthetic, AI-generated substitutes.
In an interview with Business Insider, Rabble expressed frustration with what he perceives as a misguided trend sweeping across companies like Meta and OpenAI. According to him, these corporations have embraced a misguided belief that automated, artificially created social content can somehow supplant human creativity. He forcefully rejects this notion, arguing that social media was founded on human connection rather than artificially optimized aesthetics. “Social media was social first,” he explained, underscoring the idea that genuine interaction and emotional resonance—not algorithmic perfection—fueled the early platforms’ success.
Rabble aligns his views with the concept of “enshittification,” a term coined by the author and technologist Cory Doctorow to describe the slow decay of online platforms as they prioritize the enrichment of shareholders over the satisfaction and autonomy of users. In Rabble’s eyes, DiVine functions as a technological embodiment of rebellion—his attempt “to fight back against the enshittification, in code.” While spokespeople from the major tech players mentioned declined to comment, the message behind his work remains unmistakable: the Internet must rediscover its human pulse before it becomes entirely submerged in manufactured content.
The history of Vine’s disappearance left a cultural gap that countless platforms have attempted to fill. After Twitter acquired and eventually shut down the app between 2012 and 2017, audiences turned to TikTok and its imitators—Instagram Reels, YouTube Shorts, and countless others—to satisfy their craving for short, creative bursts of video entertainment. Yet for many longtime Internet dwellers, Vine possessed a certain innocence and unfiltered humor that no successor fully replicated. This is the intimate digital history that Rabble seeks to preserve, both as an archivist and as a builder of what he envisions as an online commons.
Now 48 years old and self-deprecatingly admitting that he was “way too old” for Vine’s youthful culture, Rabble nonetheless recognized the value in its community-driven artistry. As he delved into lingering archives of the platform, he was struck by their genuineness—the unscripted laughter, playful absurdity, and sense of connection that defined early digital creativity. This discovery sparked an ambitious question: could that spirit be rebuilt in today’s era of hyper-centralized, algorithm-powered networks? And more importantly, could the original Vines themselves be reclaimed for modern viewers to experience anew? So far, his endeavor has yielded promising results. By combing through more than 2.5 terabytes of archival data, Rabble and his collaborators have successfully restored over 100,000 videos from the platform’s heyday, creating a unique bridge between past and present digital culture.
DiVine’s structural foundation is also emblematic of its ideological stance. Supported by the nonprofit organization And Other Stuff—endowed with a $10 million grant from Jack Dorsey—the project is committed to developing open-source infrastructure and applications. Rabble emphasizes that the technical costs of reinitiating DiVine were modest, requiring only a few thousand dollars, which further reflects the project’s ethos of accessibility and independence. Dorsey’s involvement is no spontaneous gesture either. Years prior, he openly lamented on X (formerly Twitter) that one of his greatest regrets was the decision to discontinue Vine, so lending his support to this resurrection feels almost like a corrective act—an acknowledgment of unfinished business in the evolution of online expression.
Efforts to revive short-form video platforms are not new. Elon Musk, in fact, briefly considered resurrecting Vine after acquiring Twitter in 2022, instructing engineers to explore its codebase. His initiative, much like similar attempts since, underscored the lingering recognition that Vine represented a rare combination of brevity, humor, and digital authenticity. Yet none of these resurrections has materialized fully—making DiVine, with its principled commitment to decentralization, seem like the most philosophically coherent heir to Vine’s memory.
Despite its nostalgic design, Rabble insists that DiVine’s purpose is not to overthrow global social media giants such as TikTok, Instagram Reels, or YouTube Shorts. Instead, he envisions a sustainable ecosystem built on community engagement and modest monetization—perhaps akin to Twitch’s model, where users reward creators through micropayments or virtual gifts. The important distinction is that DiVine presents itself as fundamentally “anti-AI,” proudly promoting “real moments from real humans” at a time when feeds are increasingly overwhelmed by synthetic audiovisuals fabricated through advanced systems like OpenAI’s Sora or Meta’s Vibes. As digital fatigue from artificiality spreads, this human-centered stance offers a refreshing alternative.
Rabble and Dorsey continue to collaborate and exchange ideas regularly, grounded in their shared aspiration for an Internet that mirrors the openness and interoperability of email. In their vision, users of a decentralized app like DiVine could choose their own providers yet remain interconnected—just as Gmail users can freely communicate with Outlook or Yahoo accounts. This concept challenges the isolation of platforms such as X, which now restricts content visibility only to logged-in users. For Rabble, such walled environments stifle the very essence of the social web. “Social media shouldn’t be a monoculture,” he stresses, voicing a conviction that online spaces must remain pluralistic, creative, and mutually accessible.
DiVine also forms part of a broader cultural movement that looks backward to move forward—a renaissance of Internet idealism in response to an age dominated by machine learning and corporate consolidation. Across the digital landscape, numerous emerging startups are seeking to recapture the intimacy and sense of community characteristic of early social networks. Some focus on fostering in-person interactions; others design independent platforms promising richer, more human connections. Even venture capitalists, traditionally drawn to scale and profit, are beginning to notice the renewed appeal of authenticity and decentralization.
Nostalgia, however, is more than sentiment—it is a design philosophy. The longing for spaces like Myspace, Tumblr, or Vine symbolizes a collective yearning for a web that once prioritized personality over profit maximization. Rabble understands this impulse deeply. As he summarized to Business Insider, DiVine is not intended as a global takeover but as a meaningful experiment: “This is a project that just feels like a good idea. It’s a project that shows the kind of Internet we want.” If even a few thousand users find joy, creativity, and belonging within its six-second windows, that outcome, he suggests, will already mark a triumph of principle over platform scale.
Sourse: https://www.businessinsider.com/vine-reboot-divine-jack-dorsey-andotherstuff-2025-11
