- Divine aims to revive spontaneous six-second videos without AI-generated content.
- Upon launch announcement, 10,000 users quickly joined the iOS beta test.
- Divine includes 170,000 archived Vine videos to complement new user-generated content.
“Road work ahead? I sure hope it does.”
“Look at all those chickens.”
“Ah, I could’ve dropped my croissant.”
Those three lines can pull a millennial or Gen Z adult straight back to the nostalgia of at-home sketches, chaotic impressions and six-second masterpieces.
Now, those moments are returning in a new app called Divine, a decentralized reboot of Vine that aims to revive human-made, spontaneous video in a social media world increasingly shaped by AI.
On Thursday, Evan Henshaw-Path, Divine’s developer, posted on X that the app’s iOS beta test hit its 10,000-user cap within four hours. Once the app is approved for the public, it will be available on both iOS and Android at divine.video.
According to the app’s website, Divine is “social media by humans, for humans,” built deliberately to restore the “creative, funny, weird and wonderfully human” authenticity that defined the original platform from 2013 to 2017.
“‘Do it for the Vine’ wasn’t just a meme,” Divine’s website writes. “It was a celebration of authentic human expression.”
TechCrunch reported that the project has launched with backing from Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey through his nonprofit “and Other Stuff,” which funds experimental open-source projects aimed at reshaping the social web.
‘What are those? …’ 170,000 archived videos
The idea began, according to Divine’s website, during interviews for the Revolution.Social podcast, when guests Yoel Roth and Taylor Lorenz expressed how much the internet had lost when Vine disappeared.
That nostalgia sparked a question: If Vine mattered so deeply to online culture, why not bring it back — this time using decentralized technology that corporations can’t control?
To rebuild it, Divine turned to the work of Archive Team, a volunteer group that rescued much of Vine’s content before the shutdown. Divine has now imported those preserved clips from the Internet Archive, giving “authentic pre-AI era videos a new home on the decentralized web,” according to the project’s site.
The app currently includes roughly 170,000 preserved videos — each labeled with a special archive badge and automatically tagged “Human-Made,” since they were created long before today’s AI video generative tools.
It has also restored 62,000 accounts, which users will be able to claim and receive login credentials for, if they can prove the account was theirs.
‘Road work ahead? I sure hope it …’ isn’t AI
Divine mirrors Vine’s original structure:
- Six-second maximum video length
- Automatic looping
- MP4 format
It includes feeds such as home, discovery, trending and hashtag-based browsing, and it allows users to create curated lists — something only employees could do on the original Vine. Now, anyone can build themed collections, playlists or “editor’s choice”-style groupings for one’s own niche or community.
The app describes its mission as a counterbalance to what it calls the rise of “AI slop” — synthetic videos flooding platforms like TikTok, YouTube and Instagram. Forbes reports that 71% of images on social media are AI-generated.
The app uses “human-made” badges that users can receive on videos to ensure something is not AI-generated. To verify, Divine uses:
- ProofMode, a cryptographic verification system that uses hardware attestation to prove a video was captured by a real device.
- Machine-learning analysis to spot suspected AI-generated content.
- Community reporting, using Nostr’s decentralized moderation standards.
‘Hey, I’m sorry I didn’t see you there. I was too busy blocking out the …’ illegal content
Despite being decentralized, Divine enforces strict boundaries on the servers it operates. The platform maintains a “zero-tolerance policy” for child sexual abuse material, illegal content, harassment, hate speech, nonconsensual imagery and spam, according to its safety standards.
Content is filtered with AI detection tools and human review, and Divine pledges to respond to reports within 24 hours — with immediate action on illegal content.
‘Hey, I want to be famous’ — creators to make money
Divine also aims to fix one of Vine’s core problems: It didn’t pay its creators. It offers a few ways to fund popular influencers and commits to not take a large cut of earnings. Creators will eventually be able to make money through these channels:
- Viewers can tip creators directly.
- Instant, low-fee payments using Bitcoin’s Lightning Network.
- Privacy-preserving payments using Cashu e-cash.
- Subscriber-only content features.
‘Free shavacado’ and decentralized social media
Unlike the first Vine — which shut down after Twitter, which owned the platform, made a corporate decision to kill the app in 2017 — Divine is designed so no company can take it offline again.
Its website emphasizes that it’s an independent project with “no affiliation to X (formerly Twitter) or the original Vine platform.” Instead, it uses Nostr — a decentralized, open protocol that distributes content across many independent relays rather than one company’s servers.
In a statement provided to TechCrunch, Dorsey said that Nostr enables developers to build networks “without the need for VC-backing, toxic business models or huge teams of engineers,” and that he funded Divine specifically to show what’s possible when social platforms can’t be shut down by a corporate owner.
The app is fully open source, with both its iOS/Flutter app and web client available on GitHub.