Wednesday, May 6, 2026

Vine is coming back, and it’s being relaunched by the guy who killed it — say hello to Jack Dorsey’s Divine, a TikTok and Instagram Stories rival with a ferocious ambition to end AI slop

  • Vine is being relaunched as a new app called Divine
  • It's being funded by Jack Dorsey, who acquired the original Vine platform in 2013
  • It's invite-only for the time being, but a wider rollout is on the way

Vine was the social media platform that defined the 2010s, and it’s making a comeback after a nearly 10-year absence. Well, kind of.

The platform that spearheaded short-form vertical feeds with its iconic six-second looping videos is being relaunched as Divine and funded by Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey, AKA the same guy who acquired Vine in 2013, and later put it to sleep in 2017. But the funniest thing about the reboot is that Dorsey has beaten Elon Musk to the punch, who previously teased restoring user access to the 2010s social media staple.

While this sounds like a dream come true for those who lived through the Vine days, Divine is invite-only for now, but the company is planning a wider rollout in the coming months. The company has also noted that while Divine is inspired by the original Vine platform, it operates entirely independently and has no affiliation with Twitter/ X.

That said, a lot has changed since Vine was shut down. Social media algorithms are smarter, and consumer habits have shifted — so how will Divine live up to TikTok, Instagram, and other rival kingpins?

Divine’s aim is two-fold: the first being nostalgia, which I think will be the catalyst for luring users. Divine will play host to an archive of over 500,000 videos from Vine’s golden days, giving you a one-stop place to relive some of the most famous online videos you probably still reference with your friends today, as well as allowing you to create and upload new content.

As far as its algorithm goes, Divine is taking an alternative approach and will let users choose how content reaches them, offering four options: Home feed, Discovery, Trending, and Hashtag feed.

“We believe that the monoculture of a single advertising-oriented algorithm is responsible for many of the issues experienced by other social media,” Divine details in its FAQs page.

A smartphone showing a tab in the Divine app

(Image credit: Divine / iOS App Store )

The second part of Divine’s goal is to take a stance against AI-generated content, which involves combining a plethora of methods to create a robust AI detection tool.

ProofMode, the main component of this, is a tool that inspects metadata to detect AI that's used to generate audio, images, and videos. On top of this, Divine has a user reporting system in place in addition to machine-learning detection and human-in-the-loop (HITL) techniques.

Despite having to wait for the broader rollout, there’s no denying that Vine’s relaunch will excite an entire generation of internet nerds who got their first online video kick from Vine. Unlike the old musical.ly platform, which was then merged with TikTok, this is a different scenario.

It’s a full-on resuscitation of an app that, despite having a significant influence on the evolution of short-form videos, was quite short-lived, and you can best believe you’ll be getting a full review when I finally get my hands on it.

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