After nearly a decade of going offline, Vine is back and, in a truly bizarre twist, Jack Dorsey is at least partially responsible. An early Twitter employee has released a beta version of the rebooted Vine — now called “Divine” — that revives the app’s six-second videos and includes a portion of the original app’s archive.
The project comes from former Twitter employee Evan Henshaw-Plath, known as “Rubble,” and is backed by Dorsey’s nonprofit “And Other Stuff,” which funds experimental social media apps built on the open source Nostr protocol. Rubble has so far managed to revive about 170,000 videos from the original Vine, thanks to an old archive created before Twitter shut down the app in 2017. In an FAQ on Devine’s website, he says he also hopes to restore “millions” of user comments and profile photos associated with those original posts.
But Divine is more than just a home for decade-old clips. New users can create their own six-second looping videos for the platform. The app also has many elements that will be familiar to those who have used Bluesky or other decentralized platforms, including customizable controls for content moderation and multiple feed algorithms to choose from. The site’s FAQ states that Devine plans to support custom, user-created algorithms as well.
Devine is also taking a pretty strong stance against AI-generated content. The app will have built-in AI detection tools that will add a badge to content that has been verified as not being created or edited with AI tools. And, according to TechCrunch, the app will block uploads of questionable AI content.
“We are in the midst of an AI takeover of social media,” Devine explains on his website. New apps like Sora are completely AI-generated. TikTok, YouTube and Instagram are increasingly full of AI slop – videos that look real but were never captured by the camera, people who don’t exist, scenarios that never happened. Divya is fighting back. We’re creating a place where human creativity is celebrated and preserved, where you can trust that what you’re seeing was created by a real person with a real camera, not generated by an algorithm.”
While this may all sound interesting, Devine has a long way to go before it’s all accomplished. The app hasn’t made it onto any app stores yet, although according to its founder, it has already added 10,000 people to the iOS beta. In the meantime, you can also browse some videos from the app, including some old Vine posts, on its website, although not all videos are working properly at the moment.
Still, any kind of reboot is good news for fans of the original, who have long hoped the app might make a comeback. Elon Musk has suggested more than once that he would somehow revive Vine, but has yet to follow through.