- Jack Dorsey is backing the return of Vine, which has been rebranded as Divine, over a decade after it shut down.
- A newly launched decentralized video app doesn’t integrate AI, and it was made available on Thursday, enabling 500,000 content creators to reclaim their accounts.
- Divine aspires to counter algorithm-driven platforms, focusing on “joy scrolling” and enhancing user autonomy.
So, it’s been eleven years since Vine went off the air, and now, Jack Dorsey is stepping in to bring it back to the App Store.
“We’re righting all the wrongs by bringing Vine back on a decentralized network,” Dorsey remarked about reviving the six-second video app now called Divine.
This decentralized app, free of AI, launched on the App Store and Google Play on Thursday, although users have to join a waiting list. Nearly 500,000 creators managed to restore their accounts and access previously uploaded content.
More and more users seem to be losing patience with algorithm-driven platforms that are saturated with AI-generated content. Divine is striving for a return to genuine, straightforward short-form videos, distinguishably banning AI content and ensuring in-app video recording to confirm authenticity.
It also offers users the freedom to choose their own content algorithm or can allow for a chronological display instead. That flexibility is a significant shift.
After a limited launch for select creators, Divine is now accessible to all.
Some heavily-followed Vine personalities have made their return, including Lele Pons and JimmyHere, expressing excitement. JimmyHere once described the original Vine as “the golden age of short-form content,” reminiscing about the simplicity—no AI or complicated brand deals, just everyday people trying to entertain with what they had.
Evan Henshaw-Plath, who leads Divine and previously collaborated with Dorsey at Twitter, observed that the reaction to the initial announcement transformed his side project into something larger. “We want to reset how people relate to technology; social media should make us feel good,” he noted.
In fact, internally, they refer to enjoying time on Vine as “joy scrolling,” a playful contrast to the notion of “doom scrolling.”
Henshaw-Plath, who now goes by Rabble, elaborated on a broader mission. “I devised a Social Media Bill of Rights last year after seeing how far some platforms had strayed from the vision of an open internet,” he stated, stressing that by developing an open protocol like Nostr using open-source code, Divine hopes to rebalance power dynamics, giving creators and users a more significant influence over their social media experiences.
