Jack Dorsey sees a fix for one of his biggest regrets. Divine, the app he funded, hit app stores this week. It revives Vine’s signature six-second looping videos. Backed by his nonprofit, it packs 500,000 archived clips from the original service. Creators can post fresh ones too. No AI junk allowed.
Vine exploded in 2012. Users crammed stories into loops. Twitter snapped it up. By 2015, 200 million accounts buzzed. But Dorsey, as CEO, pulled the plug in 2016. The service died in 2017. Archives vanished by 2019. Now Divine digs them up, thanks to Evan Henshaw-Plath—Twitter’s early engineer known as Rabble—and the Archive Team’s backups. They sifted 40-50 GB of binary files. Big data scripts rebuilt views, likes, comments. Not everything survived. Still, videos from 100,000 original creators fill the feed.
Launch day: April 29, 2026. iOS. Android. Even Nostr’s Zapstore. Invite-only for now. Waitlist users first. Creators invite fans. Gradual spread. TechCrunch called it a public debut with posting tools unlocked. 9to5Mac highlighted the iPhone drop.
Dorsey’s “and Other Stuff” nonprofit bankrolled it. Formed May 2025. Pours cash into open-source social experiments. He chipped in $10 million overall. Divine fits the bill—no returns sought. Just redemption. “By bringing back Vine on a decentralized network, they are finally correcting every mistake,” Dorsey said in a press release on the Divine blog. “It is no secret that we didn’t find a business model for Vine.” Now creators own their content. Their followers. Their cash streams—think brand deals, Patreon, collabs.
Rabble started this as a side gig. Nostalgia hit hard. But Viners pushed back. “No, no—this is way more important than just nostalgia,” they told him, per 9to5Mac. They craved a social media reset. Free of AI slop. Rabble agreed. “I decided that I was going to filter out AI content because I personally don’t like seeing AI content,” he told TechCrunch. In-app recording. C2PA checks. AI detectors. Videos label as human-made. Tap for proof.
Core: Nostr protocol. Dorsey’s favorite. Decentralized. Open-source code. No Big Tech lock-in. Testing AT Protocol—that’s Bluesky’s backbone. Eyeing ActivityPub for Mastodon ties, Threads too. Users pick algorithms. Hashtag streams. Compilation mode. Endless loops of #cats or whatever. Joy over doomscrolling, Rabble promises. “Divine began as a personal project to reconnect with a time when the internet felt creative, open, and unquestionably human,” he wrote on the blog. A movement now.
Old stars return. Lele Pons: “An iconic app. It was such a key moment in my own personal journey, and in internet culture.” Her profile: lelepons.divine.video. JimmyHere. MightyDuck. Jack and Jack. Hannah Stocking. King Bach. Even Logan Paul echoes. They post anew. Web profiles work sans app.
Engadget praised the AI ban. Creativity over ads. Constraint sparks genius. Six seconds force punch. No endless feeds optimized for rage. Dorsey eyes creator tools ahead. Public benefit corp structure. No revenue yet. Growth first.
Timing sharp. Elon Musk teased an “AI Vine” with Grok. Gizmodo says Dorsey beat him. Human-first. Open. Vine’s spirit: fun, weird, human. TikTok dominates long-form now. Divine bets short loops endure. On protocols that outlast apps.
Invite-only rebuilds networks right. Friends first. Creators lead. No algo pull. “Networks used to grow because people chose to be where their friends and favorite content creators were,” Rabble noted. X buzzes with links. Tech accounts share. Early testers hit 100,000 videos. Then 300,000. Now half a million. Momentum.
Challenges loom. Scale invites. Monetize sans ads. Protocols compete—Nostr vs. others. Viners young then; now scattered. But archive pulls. Stars tease. Dorsey’s checkbook helps. Rabble’s vision: power shift. Creators rule. Users choose. Social media, remade. Six seconds at a time.
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