Divine (styled “diVine”) is the six-second looping video app that brought Vine's format back from the dead — built by one of Twitter's founding engineers, funded by Jack Dorsey's nonprofit, and launched to the public on August 20, 2026 with a strict rule no other social app dares to try: no AI-generated content, period. If you miss the old Vine days of quick, human-made comedy, this is the reboot you've been hearing about. This is an independent guide — we're not affiliated with Divine, Dorsey, or the team behind it.
Quick facts
- What: a six-second looping video app — the spiritual successor to Vine, which Twitter shut down in 2017.
- Who built it: Evan Henshaw-Plath, known as “Rabble,” an early Twitter engineer; funded through Jack Dorsey's “and Other Stuff” nonprofit (seeded with $10 million in 2025). Dorsey holds no equity.
- Structure: a public benefit corporation, not a conventional startup chasing an exit.
- Launched: invite-only beta from November 2025; opened to the public August 20, 2026.
- Availability: free on the App Store and Google Play, plus the Nostr-powered Zapstore.
- The headline rule: every clip must be human-made — captured in Divine's own in-app camera and cryptographically signed at the moment of filming.
- The archive: hundreds of thousands of restored original Vines, rebuilt from Archive Team backups with view counts, likes, and comments intact.
What Divine actually is
Vine pioneered short-form video — six-second loops that launched creators like Logan Paul, Shawn Mendes, King Bach, and Lele Pons — and peaked at over 200 million monthly users before Twitter killed it in 2017, a decision widely seen as one of social media's great self-inflicted wounds. Divine is not formally affiliated with Vine (the rights sit with X), but it is deliberately “inspired by” it: the same scrolling feed of six-second loops, the same constraint that forces creativity into a tiny box. The full Divine explainer covers the app's features and how to get started.
The team spent nine months rebuilding Vine's lost archive before launch. Using massive Archive Team backups — 40–50 GB files — Henshaw-Plath wrote custom scripts to reconstruct not just the clips but the profiles, view counts, likes, and surviving comments of tens of thousands of original creators. Early Vine stars were brought into the beta and, by several accounts, pushed the team to delay and polish rather than rush. Scrolling Divine today means classic Vines sitting next to brand-new loops from users celebrating a platform that feels like 2014 again.
The no-AI rule: how it actually works
Every social app in 2026 claims to care about AI slop; Divine is the one built around stopping it. The enforcement is technical, not just a policy line in the terms of service. Clips are captured inside Divine's own in-app camera and cryptographically signed at the moment of filming using the Guardian Project's ProofMode software. The app is also integrating C2PA, the content-provenance standard backed by Sony, Canon, Adobe, Google, Meta, and OpenAI. Anything not shot through the app's pipeline gets blocked. As Rabble put it in interviews: he personally doesn't like feeling tricked by AI content, so he built the filter he wanted to see.
That stance is also a business bet. The feed's pitch is “create for each other, not for an algorithm” — a deliberate rejection of the engagement-optimization treadmill that ate Vine's successors. Whether a social network can survive on human-made content alone in 2026 is the experiment's open question, and the Divine vs. Vine comparison looks at what the reboot kept, changed, and is still figuring out.
Why it's built on Nostr
The deeper technical choice is the protocol. Divine is built on Nostr, a decentralized open protocol — which means a creator's profile and followers don't live on Divine's servers. That is the specific safeguard against a repeat of 2017, when Twitter shut Vine down without warning and creators lost their audiences overnight. The team has also experimented with the AT Protocol behind Bluesky and hinted at future ActivityPub integration. The idea: your identity and audience are portable, so no single company can pull the rug again. Dorsey has framed the whole project as “correcting every mistake” of the Vine shutdown — fitting, since he was the one who ordered it.
Money, brands, and the business model
Vine died partly because it never solved monetization — creators left for YouTube and Instagram, where the checks cleared. Divine is trying to build commercial opportunities in from the start. Its first brand partner, announced at launch, was Taco Bell, which gave its customers early access to sign up. The company's line is that brand collaboration should let brands “contribute to the community rather than interrupting them with conventional advertising” — a nice sentence that the next two years will test. A founding principle, per Dorsey: creators stay in full control of their content and followers, including their own revenue streams.
Early traction looks real but modest: around 100,000 users at public launch, per the founder — a rounding error next to TikTok, but a genuine community of people making deliberately human six-second comedy in an era of infinite AI feed.
Frequently asked questions
Is Divine the official Vine comeback? No — it is inspired by Vine but not affiliated with it. Vine's rights belong to X (formerly Twitter).
Can I post AI-generated videos? No. The in-app camera and cryptographic signing pipeline blocks anything not filmed by a human through the app.
Is it free? Yes — free on the App Store, Google Play, and Zapstore.
Do I own my followers? That is the design goal: Nostr-based identity means your profile and audience aren't locked to Divine's servers.
Can I watch old Vines on it? Yes — the restored archive of classic Vines is browsable alongside new uploads, with original view counts and comments where they could be recovered.
Divine is a nostalgia play with a genuinely radical engineering idea underneath: a social network where the content is provably human and the audience is provably yours. Whether that's a business or a beautiful experiment, it's the most interesting thing to happen to short video since the format was invented.
Kenji Sato
Original Post
Question from the comparison post: with 500k to 2M restored Vines in the archive, how do they handle rights? Those clips were made by creators who scattered to other platforms. "Reclaimed their profiles" sounds nice but the legal side must be complicated.
The no-AI rule enforced through in-app camera and provenance standards is a smart approach. Most "no AI" policies are just vibes — this one at least has a technical mechanism. I wonder how strict it is with edited clips though, since everyone edits their videos.