Six-second looping video app Vine is back. Almost a decade after parent company Twitter (now X) discontinued the service, it's returned as diVine.
"Make six-second loops, discover real people, and fall back in love with the kind of internet that felt alive. Weird, funny, spontaneous, brilliant. No AI slop. All human," reads the app store listing.
As TechCrunch reports, it comes with 500,000 of the original platform's top-performing videos from 100,000 creators. Ironically, the guy who axed Vine—former Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey—is the one helping bring it back via his "And Other Stuff" nonprofit.
(Credit: Google/diVine)Dorsey invested $10 million in the organization, which focuses on "open, permissionless systems that keep agency with people and communities." According to the app store listing: "Because Divine is built on an open protocol, you stay in control. Your account, your feed, your audience, your data. Not locked inside someone else’s platform."
Reviving old Vine videos wasn't easy. As TechCrunch notes, they were locked in 50GB binary files that required complex programming to decode. After releasing 100,000 videos as part of an early trial in November, it now has half a million classic Vines.
You can now watch those clips on diVine, but the app is hoping it'll inspire a new generation of creators. Shutting down Vine is widely viewed as a mistake; Twitter missed a huge opportunity to effectively court creators and will now compete with the video juggernaut TikTok. Is there an appetite to return to brief, looping clips? How much will creators stand to gain in an era where you only make big money on longer videos with big engagement numbers?
People quickly tired of OpenAI's Sora app, which initially allowed people to generate 10-second videos. Of course, Sora clips were all AI-generated, so they lacked the originality of the creators who made Vine popular. To prevent AI slop from taking over diVine fees, it requires users to record videos directly in the app or use C2PA to prove authenticity, TechCrunch reports.
DiVine is available on Google Play, but does not appear to be listed on Apple's App Store yet.