A documentary podcast has helped inspire the revival of Vine, according to diVine’s creator.
Vine: Six Seconds That Changed the World explored the rise and fall of the six-second video app that shaped internet culture and laid the foundations for today’s shortform content boom.
The eight-part podcast was released last year and presented by Scroll Deep’s Benedict Townsend. The series examined the creativity, chaos and internal tensions that ultimately led to Vine’s shutdown.
Now, a special bonus episode reveals how the podcast itself became part of Vine’s ongoing story, helping to trigger a new attempt to bring the platform back.
In the episode, diVine founder Evan Henshaw-Plath tells Townsend that listening to the series directly influenced his decision to revive the app in a new form.
The bonus episode follows a surprising chain of events involving Henshaw-Plath, one of Twitter’s first employees, alongside renewed interest in Vine from some of Silicon Valley’s most influential figures.
Last summer, Elon Musk said he was considering reviving Vine using artificial intelligence, reigniting nostalgia for the platform that once launched countless creators.
In November, it emerged that Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey was backing a separate project, diVine, which takes a very different approach. The app runs on an open-source, decentralised server, blocks AI-generated content, and aims to return control to users rather than algorithms.
Speaking on Vine: Six Seconds That Changed the World: Did We Bring Back Vine?, Henshaw-Plath credits the podcast with helping crystallise his thinking.
He says hearing Dorsey reflect on shutting down Vine as his biggest regret during the original series prompted him to act, leading him to explore how difficult it would be to rebuild a Vine-style platform for today’s internet.
In the episode, Henshaw-Plath explains that diVine is designed to preserve what made Vine culturally distinctive, while addressing what he sees as the core problems of modern social media.
He describes the project as an attempt to rebalance power away from platforms and towards communities, creators and open systems.
The connection between the podcast and the app revival runs deeper than inspiration alone. Henshaw-Plath granted the Vine: Six Seconds That Changed the World team early access to diVine’s beta, allowing the podcast to document the revival story as it unfolds, rather than simply reflecting on Vine’s past.
The special episode sees Benedict Townsend return to explore why Vine is being revived now, how diVine launched ahead of Musk’s proposed version, and why Henshaw-Plath believes decentralisation and human creativity remain essential to the future of social platforms.
Vine: Six Seconds That Changed the World: Did We Bring Back Vine? is available to listen to today on Global Player and all major podcast platforms, adding an unexpected new chapter to the story of one of the internet’s most influential apps.
