Klaxxon alert: another social network is launching on Thursday. This one, though, isn’t ruling out advertising.
It’s called diVine as a nod to Vine, the influential, though short-lived six-second video app that shaped a chunk of online culture before it was shut down by its owner, Twitter, in 2017. Behind it is Evan Henshaw-Plath, known online as Rabble, who’s a former Twitter employee who wanted to give old vines a permanent home. There’s another tie to the original. Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey is funding DiVine, though the company said he has no equity or ownership in the venture.
While DiVine is not officially affiliated with Vine, it is something of a spiritual successor to it. Users of it still watch six-second looping videos, plus there’s a “classic” tab where they can browse more than two million original Vine clips the team managed to bring back from the dead. That recovery process was tricky. Volunteers had saved Vine’s old footage years ago in a vast oddly-packaged data files. Rabble had to vibe code his own program to crack them open and match each video back up with its original likes and comments.
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