Nine years after Twitter unceremoniously shuttered Vine, Jack Dorsey is trying to undo what he's called a mistake. On April 29, Divine appeared on app stores with a curious proposition: a revival of six-second looping videos, but this time with the decentralization gospel Dorsey has been preaching since stepping away from Twitter.
Whether anyone still cares about six-second loops is the first question. Whether Dorsey's ideological commitments can translate into something people actually want to use is the second.
Divine launched with something no nostalgia play typically has—500,000 archived Vine videos from nearly 100,000 original creators. Original Vine personalities, some now with massive followings elsewhere, have already reclaimed their accounts: Lele Pons, JimmyHere, MightyDuck, Jack & Jack, King Bach, Logan and Jake Paul, Hannah Stocking. The list reads like a time capsule from when short-form video still felt novel, before TikTok turned it into an attention economy juggernaut.
For now, access is gated by invite codes. The rollout is deliberately slow, constrained as much by ideology as infrastructure.
A Platform Built on Principle (and Protocols)
This is where Divine diverges from simple revival. The app runs on Nostr, a decentralized protocol that's been gaining traction among the crypto-curious and platform-skeptical. Users own their identity through cryptographic keys. Content is signed and, in theory, portable across different clients. Just a keypair and whatever username you claim.
Evan Henshaw-Plath—known as Rabble in open-source circles, an early Twitter employee who saw the original vision before the ad dollars reshaped it—is steering the project. He's positioned Divine explicitly as an antidote to algorithmic manipulation. TikTok, Instagram Reels, YouTube Shorts: all compromised by what drives their business models, he argues.
"We're building this to give creators actual ownership," he told TechCrunch at launch. It's a familiar refrain in decentralization circles, though the track record of such promises actually materializing is, to put it mildly, mixed.
The codebase lives on GitHub under the MPL-2.0 license. Open source, transparent, community-driven—all the values that sound great in manifestos and often stumble in practice.
The AI Line in the Sand
Perhaps the most provocative stance: Divine has declared war on AI-generated content. Not just discouragement, but active blocking through a verification stack that includes C2PA supply-chain verification, ProofMode from the Guardian Project, machine learning detection, user reports, and human review. The company's language is blunt: "No AI slop."
It's a hard line to draw in 2026, when generative video tools are becoming sophisticated enough that detection is increasingly difficult. But it's also savvy positioning in a moment when AI fatigue is setting in, when audiences are craving something—anything—that feels authentically human.
Whether the verification stack can actually deliver on that promise at scale remains unclear.
How Growth Happened (Sort of)
The archive itself grew in fits. Divine started beta testing in November 2025 with roughly 100,000 archived Vine videos. By late April, that number had climbed to around 300,000. The final public launch brought it to approximately 500,000, though the iOS App Store listing still advertises "300,000+ Vine classics"—a small detail that hints at the operational realities of a small team moving fast.
And small it is. LinkedIn data suggests 2-10 people. The app had logged over 1,000 downloads on Google Play by the end of launch day, though those early numbers say little about staying power.
The app is completely independent of Twitter, X, and the original Vine intellectual property. "100% independent with zero affiliation to Vine, Twitter or X," the company clarified in its launch announcement—a necessary distinction given Dorsey's history and the inevitable confusion.
Features, Feeds, and the Algorithm Question
The format is faithful: six-second looping videos, recorded through segmented, press-and-hold controls. At launch, Divine introduced "compilation mode," which autoplays streams from hashtags—#cats, presumably, among others. Users can choose their algorithms rather than having one imposed, with home, discovery, trending, and hashtag feeds available. Community algorithms are promised down the road.
Posts can be set to expire after a day, week, year, or decade. But here's where decentralization gets messy: deletion requests propagate to relays that may or may not comply. It's the trade-off that comes with distributed architecture. No central authority means no central control, even over your own content's lifespan.
The ecosystem supports Bitcoin "zaps"—direct micropayments to creators, according to a company post from mid-March explaining the protocol's financial layer. Whether casual users will embrace cryptocurrency rails for tipping is another question entirely.
The Money Problem (Which Is to Say, There Isn't Any)
Divine has no revenue model. Not yet, anyway.
The company is structured as a public benefit corporation through Verse Communications PBC, the entity listed as developer on Google Play. The iOS listing shows Verse Communications Inc, with copyright attributed to Rabble Labs Limited. Multiple legal entities scattered across app surfaces—not unusual for early-stage projects navigating jurisdictions and structures, but not exactly confidence-inspiring either.
TechCrunch reported that potential creator monetization could eventually come through direct support, brand deals, possibly a "Pro" tier. An OpenCollective page for "diVine Keepers" through the nonprofit And Other Stuff showed $330 raised from four contributors as of late April—a humble start, to say the least.
Dorsey's involvement comes through And Other Stuff, the nonprofit he formed in May 2025 and committed $10 million to that July. The funding for Divine is grant-based. No equity, no ownership stake. "He doesn't own Divine," the FAQ clarifies.
Still, his fingerprints are everywhere—philosophically if not legally. The emphasis on decentralization, the rejection of surveillance capitalism, the belief that protocols beat platforms: these are Dorsey's convictions, articulated over years as he's drifted further from the commercial realities that built Twitter into a multi-billion dollar company.
Whether those convictions can build something that survives contact with ordinary users—people who just want to watch funny videos, not manage cryptographic keys—is the test ahead. Access continues expanding through invites as the network scales, a constraint that's partly technical, partly strategic.
Maybe it works. Maybe Vine's magic was always going to be impossible to recapture, and bolting it onto decentralized infrastructure just adds complexity without solving for what actually made short-form video take off in the first place: ease, virality, network effects that centralized platforms are very, very good at manufacturing.
Either way, Divine is live. The bet is on the table. And somewhere, six-second loops are playing again.
