I remember tapping Vine at a bus stop in 2014 and feeling the world fold into six seconds. Yesterday I opened a new app and my thumb froze on the play button. If you watch feeds for a living, this arrival matters to you.
I’ve followed Jack Dorsey’s projects for years, and I’ll tell you plainly: Divine—funded by Dorsey’s And Other Stuff collective—has launched on the Apple App Store and Google Play as an invite-only app. It bundles a half-million preserved Vine clips from ArchiveTeam and the Internet Archive, runs on open-source stacks and the decentralized Nostr protocol, and is being positioned as an antidote to ad-saturated recommendation engines. Elon Musk teased an “AI Vine” with Grok Imagine; Dorsey’s group shipped an actual Vine revival first.
A search result on a crowded app chart revealed Divine’s arrival.
That small moment — a name popping in search — tells the real story: someone moved faster. Divine is the work of Evan Henshaw-Plath, known as Rabble, and it’s rooted in the original platform’s archive and vibe. Vine launched in 2013 under Twitter when Jack Dorsey was in charge, helped launch creators such as Logan Paul, Lele Pons, and Liza Koshy, then folded in 2017. The new app doesn’t claim lineage with X (formerly Twitter); it emphasizes independence while restoring a massive historical library.
What is the Divine app?
Divine is a six-second looping video app with two parts: a live social layer built on Nostr and an attached archive of classic Vine clips preserved by ArchiveTeam and the Internet Archive. It’s invite-only at launch, free to download, and designed to give creators more ownership over content through decentralized infrastructure and open-source tooling.
A beat of silence in a feed is where Divine shows its difference.
The promise isn’t flashy features; it’s a refusal. Divine advertises a “multi-layered approach to detecting Gen-AI content” and says it will keep the platform mostly AI-free. Users can pick from multiple recommendation algorithms instead of being swept by one ad-first engine. I tested a few loops and felt the old rush return — no autoplay treadmill, more control.
Divine is a time machine for attention. It brings back the short-form craft and the archival DNA without automatically handing creators’ work to a centralized gatekeeper.
How is Divine different from X (formerly Twitter)?
X once birthed Vine; Divine uses different priorities. X is a centralized, single-company product with business incentives tied to large-scale ad delivery. Divine runs on decentralized protocols, open-source code, and a philosophy that creators should control followers and content, a point Jack Dorsey emphasized in his statement about correcting earlier mistakes.
A notification from Dorsey’s collective landed in my inbox; his quote landed on the press page.
That concrete message—public praise, funding, and a clear argument about creator control—matters for the platform’s credibility. And Other Stuff backed the project to test experimental models for ownership and revenue that don’t rely solely on advertising revenue. Divine’s roadmap includes broader rollout plans, algorithm choice for users, and revenue options for creators.
The archive is muscle memory for the internet. Bringing those half-million six-second clips back gives context, culture, and a pipeline for creators who learned their craft in tiny loops.
I’ll keep watching how the app scales, how its anti-AI posture holds up, and whether creators can truly monetize without surrendering control to a single recommendation engine. Will you download Divine to judge whether a six-second loop can still steal attention?