Before there was TikTok and Instagram Reels, there was Vine. The app that allowed for only six seconds of video was home to some amazing creative content and turned some of its celebrities into stars beyond the platform. But just like the videos it hosted, Vine’s life was short; it launched in 2013 and was shuttered by Twitter in 2017. Nothing truly dies on the internet, though, and Vine is (sort of) back as Divine.

Divine is now host to over 100,000 hours of archived Vine content, and is also a place where creators can once again post short-form content. The new Divine has no affiliation with the original Vine, though it does have financial backing from Twitter founder Jack Dorsey’s nonprofit “and Other Stuff” and is built by Evan Henshaw-Plath, a member of the “and Other Stuff” and a former Twitter employee.

Divine aims to restore creator ownership and authenticity

The inspiration to bring back Divine has its roots in the Revolution.Social podcast, which is hosted by Henshaw-Plath under the moniker Rabble. On the show, both tech exec Yoel Roth and tech journalist Taylor Lorenz expressed how they missed Vine and its unique culture.

That led Henshaw-Plath to build Divine on Nostr, a decentralized social networking protocol supported by Dorsey. In a statement to TechCruch, Dorsey said: “The reason I funded the non-profit, and Other Stuff, is to allow creative engineers like Rabble to show what’s possible in this new world, by using permissionless protocols which can’t be shut down based on the whim of a corporate owner.”

The preserved Vine videos on Divine come from a backup done in 2016 by a collective called ArchiveTeam. Henshaw-Plath then reconstructured the content, including oarts of the information associated with them like views and some comments.

A dedication to human-made social media

“Divine has imported archived videos from ArchiveTeam’s preservation work, giving these authentic pre-AI era videos a new home on the decentralized web. We’re committed to restoring creator ownership and attribution when possible, honoring those who created these cultural artifacts.” – Divine statement

Divine acknowledges the AI takeover that has consumed video-based social media thanks to apps like Sora, and promises that won’t be the case on its platform. To do this, it utilizes a technology called ProofMode that cryptographically verifies that videos being posted on Divine are captured by actual cameras, and are not AI-generated.

Divine asserts, “We’re not against AI existing—we’re against AI pretending to be human. 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.”

It will be interesting to see if creators and consumers of short-form content accept a return to how the medium began.