Vine returns: A lost Internet icon finds new life through Divine

For years, Vine has occupied a special place in internet nostalgia. The platform’s rapid-fire six-second videos helped define an entire era of online humor and creativity, launching careers for artists and influencers such as Shawn Mendes, Logan Paul, and King Bach. When Twitter abruptly discontinued the app in 2016 and then shut down its remaining web archive the following year, a piece of early social media culture vanished with it. What survived lived mostly in scattered YouTube compilations, stitched together by fans who weren’t ready to let the moment go.

That digital void is now being filled in an unexpected way. A new platform called Divine, supported by Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey, is positioning itself as both a spiritual successor to Vine and a preservation effort for one of the internet’s most influential creative communities. At the center of the project is something remarkable: an actual restored archive of Vine videos, rescued before the service disappeared entirely.

The app is the brainchild of Evan Henshaw-Plath, one of Twitter’s earliest employees and now a collaborator within Dorsey’s non-profit organization, and Other Stuff. Working from massive binary files collected by the volunteer-led Archive Team, Henshaw-Plath spent months building custom scripts designed to reassemble the fragments of the old network. His work involved reconstructing not just the short clips themselves, but also key elements of the surrounding ecosystem: creator profiles, metadata, and even traces of user comments that had been preserved in the original files.

The result is a surprisingly comprehensive revival. According to Henshaw-Plath, the team managed to recover between 150,000 and 200,000 Vine videos from approximately 60,000 different creators. The rebuilt library, estimated to be between 40 and 50 gigabytes in size, represents one of the largest restorations of a defunct social media platform ever undertaken by independent archivists.

But Divine is not simply a museum for old Vine content. It also functions as a living platform designed to rekindle the spirit of fast, experimental creativity that defined the original app. Users can register normally and upload their own six-second videos, echoing the format that once made Vine so distinct. The app includes navigation tools such as Search and a Hashtag Explorer, providing familiar ways for people to discover trends, jokes, and micro-stories emerging within the modern community.

In a thoughtful nod to the past, Divine allows original Vine creators to reclaim their old accounts. Verification happens through the social media links those users originally listed in their bios, offering a lightweight but effective system for connecting the restored archive to real people. It’s a subtle touch, but one that reinforces the project’s archival integrity and respect for creators who helped define the early internet.

Beyond nostalgia, the Divine team says their motivation comes from a desire to preserve a style of online creativity that existed before the rise of AI-generated media. To that end, they have added a feature called ProofMode. This system attaches cryptographic markers to videos, embedding hardware information and digital signatures that help confirm a clip was recorded by a real camera rather than generated by an AI model. In an era where authenticity is increasingly uncertain, ProofMode is presented as a safeguard designed to keep the platform rooted in genuine human expression.