After almost ten years of dormancy, the short-video service Vine is experiencing a partial resurrection, with involvement from former Twitter executive Jack Dorsey. A prototype of the updated application, rebranded as 'Divine,' has been unveiled by an ex-Twitter staffer, bringing back the signature six-second clips and incorporating selections from the platform's historical content library.
The initiative is led by Evan Henshaw-Plath, known online as 'Rabble,' and receives support from Dorsey's charitable organization 'and Other Stuff,' which invests in innovative social networking tools developed using the open-source nostr framework. Rabble has successfully recovered roughly 170,000 clips from a pre-2017 preservation effort conducted prior to Twitter's discontinuation of the service. The Divine site's informational section indicates ambitions to recover 'millions' of related user remarks and account images linked to those legacy uploads.
Beyond preserving past material, Divine enables fresh participants to produce their own looping six-second recordings. It incorporates features reminiscent of decentralized networks like Bluesky, such as user-defined moderation settings and various selectable feed sorting methods. The platform's details page outlines intentions to integrate bespoke sorting options designed by users themselves.
Divine adopts a firm position opposing artificially produced media. It integrates detection mechanisms for AI that apply labels to submissions confirmed as free from AI creation or modification. Reports from TechCrunch reveal that the system will prevent the submission of material suspected to involve AI generation.
'We're in the middle of an AI takeover of social media,' Divine states on its site. New apps like Sora are entirely AI-generated. TikTok, YouTube, and Instagram are increasingly flooded with AI slop—videos that look real but were never captured by a camera, people who don't exist, scenarios that never happened. Divine is fighting back. We're creating a space where human creativity is celebrated and protected, where you can trust that what you're watching was made by a real person with a real camera, not generated by an algorithm.'
Despite its promising elements, Divine faces significant development hurdles ahead. It remains unavailable on major application marketplaces, although the creator reports enrollment of 10,000 individuals in an iOS testing phase. For now, visitors can explore select content, including archived Vine material, directly on the website, albeit with some playback issues persisting.
This development offers encouragement to longtime enthusiasts of the initial Vine, many of whom have anticipated a potential return. Tesla CEO Elon Musk has repeatedly floated ideas for reinstating the service under his ownership but has not yet acted on those proposals.