When Elon Musk announced that Grok Imagine was the new “AI Vine” last year, he also teased the possibility of bringing back Vine’s old video archive in some form. But a Jack Dorsey-funded app just beat him to it.
Divine is a new six-second looping video app that also features an archive of 500,000 classic videos from the original Vine platform. The app was announced in beta last year, but officially launched today on the Apple App Store and Google Play. For now, it’s invite-only, though the company says a broader rollout is planned in the coming months.
Vine was originally released in 2013 under Twitter, when the company was led by Dorsey, and it became a pioneer in short-form social video, helping pave the way for popular vertical video platforms like TikTok and Instagram Reels. It also helped launch the careers of many of today’s biggest internet personalities, including Logan Paul, Lele Pons, and Liza Koshy, before Twitter shut it down in 2017.
Now, Jack Dorsey’s online collective And Other Stuff, which funds experimental open-source projects, has helped bankroll its revival.
This new iteration was created by Evan Henshaw-Plath, a former Twitter employee and member of And Other Stuff. Henshaw-Plath, who goes by “Rabble,” said he was inspired to bring the platform back to life after listening to the podcast series Vine: Six Seconds That Changed the World.
Still, the company stresses that Divine is an independent app that has no affiliation with X, formerly Twitter, or the original Vine platform. The project is built on open-source technology and the decentralized Nostr protocol. Its growing collection of classic Vine videos is sourced from archives preserved by ArchiveTeam and the Internet Archive.
Divine is also trying to stand apart from modern social media apps in a few key ways. Instead of relying on centralized servers controlled by a single company, the platform runs on decentralized infrastructure, which it says gives creators more ownership and control over their content.
The app also aims to stay mostly AI-free through what it describes in its FAQ page as a “multi-layered approach to detecting Gen-AI content.” Users will also reportedly have more control over the algorithms powering their feeds. Instead of relying on a single advertising-focused recommendation engine, Divine says users will be able to choose from multiple algorithms within a broader ecosystem of algorithms.
“By bringing back Vine on a decentralized network, they are finally correcting every mistake,” said Jack Dorsey in a press release. “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.”
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