A brand new venture to deliver again Vine’s six-second looping movies is now obtainable for obtain on the App Retailer and Google Play. Divine, as this Vine reboot is named, affords 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 Might 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 seeking to get a return right here. Relatively, his purpose is to appropriate an earlier mistake he made as CEO of Twitter: shutting down Vine within 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 neighborhood archiving venture often known as the Archive Team.
These movies had been saved as massive, 40-50 GB binary information, which required Rabble to put in writing massive information scripts to determine how the information labored and find out how to reconstruct them, together with the person engagement, just like the views, likes, and feedback, that had been related to the unique movies.
Not all information was capable of be restored, however progress has been made. The app initially launched to testers final November with some 100,000 of Vine’s prime movies, then grew to round 300,000 movies simply forward of at the moment’s launch, Rabble instructed TechCrunch. Now, the app hosts roughly 500,000 movies from almost 100,000 unique Vine creators because it turns into publicly obtainable for the primary time.
The hassle has attracted the eye 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 net, even when you don’t have the Divine cellular app.)
Rabble mentioned the preliminary plan was to shortly push out the app after some preliminary exams, however early Viners inspired the staff to carry off.
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“It was truly the Viners who had been like ‘no, no — that is far more vital than simply nostalgia,” he explains. The customers mentioned they needed one thing like Vine that will reset social media and filter out AI slop. “They’re those who instructed us to attend and get it proper. And in order that’s what we did.”
The staff rolled up their sleeves, revisited and rewrote the code in elements, and targeted on the app’s design.
The model of Divine launching at the moment is a results of these efforts, and consists of options like compilation mode, which displays how a lot of at the moment’s youngest technology grew up watching Vines. With this mode, individuals can create their very own lists of movies to make their very own compilations.
To make use of compilations, you can go to a hashtag, like #cats, and it’ll autoplay a stream of matching Vine movies. You may cease the stream to work together with the content material, like reposting or liking the movies, or you may simply sit again and watch.
One other key side of Divine’s worth proposition is its lack of AI-generated content material.
“I made a decision that I used to be going to filter out AI content material as a result of I personally don’t like seeing AI content material. I don’t like feeling tricked,” Rabble says. “I don’t like the concept that tons of content material could be made in a short time and with little humanity or thought.”
To maintain the community free from this undesirable content material, or “AI slop,” because it’s usually referred to as, DiVine requires customers to both report movies immediately within 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.
Past providing the expertise of bringing again Vine, the app’s different mission is to popularize open protocols — one thing that delivers on Rabble’s vision for reclaiming social media from the tech giants. Divine itself is constructed on the open social protocol Nostr, and the staff is experimenting with integrating the open supply AT Protocol, which powers Bluesky. Sooner or later, Divine can also combine with the ActivityPub protocol, which underpins various 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. However Rabble believes that it might enable digital creators to take again some management over their on-line presence, which they might monetize through model offers or collabs, as they do at present. He additionally likes the Patreon mannequin for supporting creators immediately and the concept of a Professional account that would offer further options.
“Many people got here from Vine, and it was the start of every thing,” mentioned OG Viner, Lele Pons, concerning the app’s relaunch. “An iconic app. It was such a key second in my very own private journey, and in web tradition, it makes me so completely happy to see these early classics introduced again to life, and to have the prospect to make new ones.”
Divine is on the market as a free obtain on the App Retailer, Google Play, and the Nostr-powered Zapstore. Initially, it’ll roll out entry to these on the waitlist and can let others in steadily through using invite codes.
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