Vine-style app Divine goes public: Jack Dorsey-backed reboot bets on archives and an AI-free feed

Divine, a Vine-inspired short-video app backed by a nonprofit associated with Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey, has launched publicly on iOS and Android. The release opens up access to roughly 500 000 restored looping videos and adds tools for creators to post new clips.

The app is financed by and Other Stuff, a nonprofit formed in 2025 to support experimental open-source projects aimed at reshaping social media. Supporters frame Divine as a second chance to revisit Vine’s cultural impact after Twitter shut the original service down in 2016.

Divine was built by Evan Henshaw-Plath, an early Twitter employee known online as Rabble, who explored and reconstructed portions of the Vine archive. He has credited the Archive Team community for preserving data that made the recovery effort possible.

Rebuilding a lost short-video archive

Henshaw-Plath said parts of the archive were stored in large binary files, requiring custom scripts to interpret and reassemble videos alongside engagement data such as likes and comments. Not all information could be recovered, but the available library has expanded significantly since early testing.

The app first appeared in a limited tester release with about 100 000 top videos and later grew to around 300 000 ahead of launch. Divine now hosts about 500 000 videos from nearly 100 000 original creators, with some early Vine personalities already claiming profiles.

An AI-free pitch and open protocols

Divine is positioning itself against what its team calls low-quality AI-generated content, aiming to keep the feed focused on human-made videos. The app requires users to record inside the app or verify uploaded media using C2PA, a provenance standard designed to document how content was created and edited.

Beyond nostalgia, Divine is also promoting open social infrastructure, building on the Nostr protocol while experimenting with AT Protocol integration and considering ActivityPub support. The company says the goal is to give creators more control and portability than traditional, closed social networks.

Divine is free to download and is structured as a public benefit corporation, with no finalized revenue model. The team has suggested creator support options could eventually include direct patron-style payments or paid accounts with additional features.