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Divine, a Jack Dorsey-backed revival of Vine, is now available on the App Store

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Why This Matters

Divine marks a significant revival of the beloved short-form video platform Vine, leveraging its extensive archive and new content to reconnect with nostalgic users and creators. Its integration with open social media protocols like Nostr and AT Protocol highlights a move towards decentralized and transparent social networking, potentially reshaping how users engage online. This reboot offers both nostalgic value and innovative technology, signaling a shift towards more user-centric and open social media experiences for consumers and the industry alike.

Key Takeaways

Featuring hundreds of thousands of archive videos from the original Vine platform, in addition to new videos, Divine is now available on the App Store and Google Play. Here are the details.

Vine is back as Divine

Longtime social network users might remember Vine, a short-form video platform that quickly rose to success after launching in June 2012 and was acquired by Twitter almost immediately.

In essence, Vine allowed users to share looped videos that were up to 6 seconds long. It attracted artists and creators, reaching more than 200 million active users by the end of 2015.

However, after years of stagnation, Twitter shut down the app in 2017 and kept its video catalog accessible until 2019.

A large portion of this catalog is now back on Divine, a new app by Jack Dorsey-backed nonprofit and Other Stuff.

The app was originally announced last year and remained in beta until today, when it became available on the App Store and Google Play.

As reported by TechCrunch, the launch of this Vine reboot was the result of an intensive reconstruction effort, which involved rebuilding the original archive from large backup files and restoring associated engagement data.

Here’s TechCrunch on how Evan Henshaw-Plath, a member of the team behind Divine, described Divine’s path to a now fully-functional, rebooted video social network, based on the same concept of the original Vine platform:

“It was actually the Viners who were like ‘no, no — this is way more important than just nostalgia’,” he explains. The users said they wanted something like Vine that would reset social media and filter out AI slop. “They’re the ones who told us to wait and get it right. And so that’s what we did.”

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