Jack Dorsey has funded a Vine reboot called Divine.
A vine reboot is here, called Divine. It’s a new open source app launched with funding from Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey that aims to bring the same spirit of Vine. It has 6-second loops, videos from the previous iteration, and AI-generated content is not allowed.
The exact range of videos is somewhere between 150K-200K from around 60K creators, though millions of smaller or niche clips, such as many K-pop Vines, were lost. Vine creators still retain ownership of their work and can file DMCA takedowns or reclaim their accounts by verifying their old linked social profiles. Once verified, they can add new uploads or re-post any missing content.
It’s led by dev Evan Henshaw-Plath, aka Rabble, who worked on the original version of Vine. On Bluesky, the devs said their goal for the revival is that it’s open source, you control your own account, there’s no algorithm, users run their own servers, and they can’t shut it down.
To ensure that modern uploads remain human-made, Divine uses verification technology from The Guardian Project, a nonprofit that authenticates whether videos were actually recorded on smartphones. The platform is also built on Nostr, a decentralized, open-source protocol Dorsey has championed for its ability to prevent corporate control or censorship. “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,” Jack Dorsey said in a statement to Techcrunch. “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 permission-less protocols which can’t be shut down based on the whim of a corporate owner.”
Twitter (X)’s current owner, Elon Musk, has also promised to bring back Vine, having announced in August that the company discovered the old video archive. But so far, nothing has been publicly launched. He’s also teased it will be focused on AI-generated content, which is a garbage idea that no one wants. Divine on the other hand is running on the idea that people want to see content from real people. Any AI-generated content will be automatically blocked from being posted.
“So much of my social media feeds, especially on the big platforms, what Meta is pushing, what Elon [Musk] wants to do with video, what OpenAI launched [with Sora] is all this AI slop … you watch the video and then you go look at the comments and it says ‘this is AI’ … I wanted something where we could have a social media platform that had none of that. Where users could go in and say, ‘I know this is real’. So we used a bunch of human rights tech to verify that everything that gets shot and published on Divine is a real video shot by a real person. It’s about trying to get back to that authenticity.”
— Rabble
The Divine app is now in beta and available on iOS and Android at https://divine.video/. Devs have announced that near 10K people have already joined.
To join, you’ll need Apple TestFlight. You can download it off the App Store and then download the beta through the link above. Learn more about all that here.
Devs have confirmed to us that there are some issues with the Android version and they’re working on it.
User @le_ch3f on Twitter (X) noticed the name was changed from ‘diVine’ to ‘Divine’ this week. Their devs have also confirmed with us the name was changed due to an issue with Apple.
For official updates on Divine, you can check their website or follow them on Bluesky. Rabble is also posting updates on his Twitter.
For more social media updates, check out our section for it on our site.