Rejoice! Jack Dorsey (Who Killed Vine) Is Resurrecting Vine

Jack Dorsey made a lot of people unhappy in 2017. His website (then called “Twitter”) had acquired the TikTok precursor known as Vine, but despite all the viral fun, the bird app didn’t know what to do with it and decided to shut it down. At the time, Vine was the closest to the kind of micro-entertainment brain candy that ByteDance has since spread to all corners of the globe. People loved it, and they were sad to see it go. But, as it turns out, the Dorsey giveth just as much as he taketh away.

That’s only a way of saying that Jack appears to be giving new life to the app whose life he originally cut short. Dorsey’s non-profit, “and Other Stuff,” has been working on launching an archive of some 100,000 old Vine videos, TechCrunch reports. The videos will be available in an app, dubbed deVine (get it?), which will be hosted on Nostr, an open-source protocol.

“Nostr — the underlying open source protocol being used by diVine — is empowering developers to create a new generation of apps without the need for VC-backing, toxic business models or huge teams of engineers,” Dorsey shared with TC, in a statement. “The reason I funded the non-profit, and Other Stuff, is to allow creative engineers like Rabble to show what’s possible in this new world, by using permissionless protocols which can’t be shut down based on the whim of a corporate owner.”

Evan Henshaw-Plath, who is identified as a former Twitter employee (and who goes by the name of “Rabble), is identified as the project leader for diVine. Rabble, who now works with “and Other Stuff,” told TechCrunch that resurrecting the videos was all about doing something fun.

“So basically, I’m like, can we do something that’s kind of nostalgic?” Rabble told the outlet. “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?”

“I wasn’t able to get all of them out, but I was able to get a lot out and basically reconstruct these Vines and these Vine users, and give each person a new user [profile] on this open network,” Rabble said, noting that they had been able to breath new life into “about 150,000 to 200,000 of the videos from about 60,000 of the creators.”

The beta test of the iOS app launched on Thursday and quickly ran out of available slots for new users but you can try it on the web here.