Jack Dorsey-backed Vine reboot Divine launches to the public

A brand new mission to carry again Vine’s six-second looping movies is now out there for obtain on the App Store and Google Play. Divine, as this Vine reboot known as, provides entry to an archive of roughly 500,000 Vine movies, restored from a backup of the unique service, and permits creators to put up new Vines as soon as once more.

Divine was financed by “and Other Stuff,” a nonprofit shaped in May 2025 by Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey. The non-profit is concentrated on funding experimental open supply initiatives which have the potential to remodel the social media panorama. Dorsey’s backing of Divine doesn’t make him a standard investor since he’s not trying to get a return right here. Rather, his aim is to right an earlier mistake he made as CEO of Twitter: shutting down Vine in the first place.

To create Divine, Evan Henshaw-Plath, an early Twitter worker and member of “and Other Stuff,” explored the Vine archive. Henshaw-Plath, who goes by “Rabble” on-line, defined that a lot of Vine’s content material was initially backed up by a group archiving mission referred to as the Archive Team.

Those movies had been saved as giant, 40-50 GB binary information, which required Rabble to write massive knowledge scripts to determine how the information labored and the way to reconstruct them, together with the person engagement, like the views, likes, and feedback, that had been related to the unique movies.

Not all knowledge was ready to be restored, however progress has been made. The app initially launched to testers final November with some 100,000 of Vine’s high movies, then grew to round 300,000 movies simply forward of in the present day’s launch, Rabble informed TechCrunch. Now, the app hosts roughly 500,000 movies from practically 100,000 unique Vine creators because it turns into publicly out there for the first time.

The effort has attracted the consideration of a number of early Vine creators, together with Lele Pons, JimmyHere, MightyDuck, and Jack and Jack, amongst others. (Divine person profiles are viewable on the internet, even for those who don’t have the Divine cellular app.)

Rabble mentioned the preliminary plan was to shortly push out the app after some preliminary assessments, however early Viners inspired the workforce to maintain off.

“It was truly the Viners who had been like ‘no, no — this is way more important than just nostalgia,” he explains. The users said they wanted something like Vine that would reset social media and filter out AI slop. “They’re the ones who informed us to wait and get it proper. And in order that’s what we did.”

The workforce rolled up their sleeves, revisited and rewrote the code in elements, and centered on the app’s design.

The model of Divine launching in the present day is a results of these efforts, and consists of options like compilation mode, which displays how a lot of in the present day’s youngest era grew up watching Vines. With this mode, individuals can create their very own lists of movies to make their very own compilations.

To use compilations, you could possibly go to a hashtag, like #cats, and it’ll autoplay a stream of matching Vine movies. You can cease the stream to work together with the content material, like reposting or liking the movies, or you possibly can simply sit again and watch.

Another key side of Divine’s worth proposition is its lack of AI-generated content material.

“I decided that I was going to filter out AI content because I personally don’t like seeing AI content. I don’t like feeling tricked,” Rabble says. “I don’t like the idea that tons of content can be made very quickly and with little humanity or thought.”

To hold the community free from this undesirable content material, or “AI slop,” because it’s typically referred to as, DiVine requires customers to both report movies straight in the app or confirm how uploaded movies had been created utilizing C2PA, an open trade normal that establishes the origin and the edits to digital content material.

Beyond providing the expertise of bringing again Vine, the app’s different mission is to popularize open protocols — one thing that delivers on Rabble’s imaginative and prescient for reclaiming social media from the tech giants. Divine itself is constructed on the open social protocol Nostr, and the workforce is experimenting with integrating the open supply AT Protocol, which powers Bluesky. In the future, Divine may combine with the ActivityPub protocol, which underpins different social networks like Mastodon and Flipboard, and is constructed into Meta’s Threads.

Divine has no income mannequin and is structured as a public profit company. But Rabble believes that it may permit digital creators to take again some management over their on-line presence, which they might monetize by way of model offers or collabs, as they do presently. He additionally likes the Patreon mannequin for supporting creators straight and the concept of a Pro account that would offer extra options.

“Many of us came from Vine, and it was the beginning of everything,” mentioned OG Viner, Lele Pons, about the app’s relaunch. “An iconic app. It was such a key moment in my own personal journey, and in internet culture, it makes me so happy to see these early classics brought back to life, and to have the chance to make new ones.”

Divine is obtainable as a free obtain on the App Store, Google Play, and the Nostr-powered Zapstore. Initially, it’ll roll out entry to these on the waitlist and can let others in steadily by way of the use of invite codes.