Vine Rebooted as 'Divine' App, Backed by Jack Dorsey

Remember Vine? The short-form video app from back when people were sharing creative things just for fun and not primarily to maximize engagement and make more money? It's back, thanks in large part to Jack Dorsey, who was chairman of Twitter when it bought Vine a few months before it debuted in 2013.

Divine — a rebooted version of the app with no affiliation to Vine, Twitter or X — is now available for iOS and Android. As with Vine, users create and share looping videos with a maximum length of six seconds.

However, access is invite-only for now, with creators gradually bringing in friends and followers before a broader rollout. Old-school viners such as Lele Pons, JimmyHere, MightyDuck and Jack and Jack have reclaimed their accounts. Some users are already posting vines and you can view these on the Divine website.

Dorsey provided funding for Divine through the And Other Stuff open-source development collective he's backing. Divine is built on the Nostr open protocol that Dorsey has long been involved with, and it says creators will maintain control over their content.

According to a press release, it's designed primarily for "creativity and constraint over engagement for an ad algorithm" and — get this — it's "a place for authentic, non-AI-generated media." In fact, the app has an outright ban on AI slop, which is delightful.

Divine is using a cryptographic approach to verify the authenticity of videos. New videos in the Divine feed have a label indicating whether they're human-made. You can tap or click on this for more details and to run a generative AI detection scanner.

"By bringing back Vine on a decentralized network, they are finally correcting every mistake," Dorsey said. "It is no secret that we didn't find a business model for Vine. A founding principle for Divine is that creators will always be in full control of their content and followers, enabling them to create and grow their own revenue streams. I anticipate that Divine will provide a host of tools and services to support the growth of the creator economy."

The team behind Divine have rolled in more than 500,000 videos from the original app. These were recovered from an archive that was set up before Twitter shut down Vine in 2017. The project is led by Evan Henshaw-Plath, an ex-Twitter employee who is known as "Rabble."