Jack Dorsey-backed revival of Vine now available for iPhone

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.

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:

Another interesting aspect of Divine is its underlying technology, which relies on Nostr, an open social media protocol that was also backed by Jack Dorsey.

TechCrunch says that the team behind Divine is “experimenting with integrating the open source AT Protocol, which powers Bluesky,” and might also “integrate with the ActivityPub protocol, which underpins alternative social networks like Mastodon and Flipboard, and is built into Meta’s Threads.”

To learn more about Divine, follow this link.