Nearly ten years after going offline, the vine is (sort of) back and, in a brizerre twist, Jack Dorsey is at least partly responsible. The original Twitter employee released a beta version of the redesigned Vine – now called “Divine” – which updates six and a half videos and includes part of the maintenance of the original application.
The project comes from Evan Henshaw-Plath, a former Twitter employee who goes by “labs,” and has backed Dorsey’s nonprofit “and other things,” which is a social media test fund built on the open source Nostr Protocol. Rabrable has managed to resurrect about 170,000 videos from the original vintage thanks to an old archive created before Twitter shut down the app in 2017. FAQ on Photitter Photos and profile photos related to the original post.
But Divine is more than just a home for the ages. New users can create their first six videos from scratch for the platform. The app also has many features that will be familiar to people who have used Bluesky or other classified platforms, including customized controls for reviewing content and multiple feed algorithms to choose from. The site’s FAQ states that top plans support user-generated algorithms.
God is also taking a positive stance against AI-generated content. The app will have built-in detection tools that will add badges to content that has been verified as not created or edited by AI tools. Also, according to TechCrunch, the app will block the upload of AI content that is suspected of being suspicious.
“We are in the middle of a social media takeover,” Divine explains on its website. New applications like sora are completely produced. Tiktok, YouTube, and Instagram are flooded with Ai slop videos that look real but never caught on camera, people who don’t exist, situations that never happened. God fights back. We’re creating a space where people’s creativity is celebrated and protected, where you can trust that you’re watching what’s being done by a real person with a real camera, not generated by an algorithm. “
While all that might sound interesting, Divine has a long way to go before it can achieve all that. The app hasn’t made it to the app store yet, although it has already added 10,000 people to the iOS beta, according to its developer. In the meantime, you can browse the app’s other videos, including some older posts, on its website, although not all videos are working properly yet.
Still, any sort of reboot is good news for fans of the original, who have long hoped the app could make a comeback. Elon Musk has repeatedly suggested that he will revive the vine in some way, but he has yet to follow through.
