Is Vine back? Vine successor app Divine opens to the public with a total ban on AI content

[Natalie61]

A new app called Divine, widely described as a spiritual successor to the long dead short form video service Vine, officially opened to the public on August 20 after nine months of development and a beta testing period. Like the original Vine, Divine centers on looping six second videos, and it hosts an archive of more than two million original Vine clips that volunteers managed to recover and restore before Twitter shut the platform down back in 2017, complete with the original likes and comments intact.

The app was built by Evan Henshaw-Plath, an early Twitter employee who goes by Rabble online, and it's financially backed by Twitter co founder Jack Dorsey through his nonprofit and Other Stuff. Henshaw-Plath told the BBC he built Divine because he felt social media needed a reset, saying he was sick and tired of watching videos and not knowing whether what he was looking at was even real anymore. That sentiment shapes the app's single biggest differentiator, an outright ban on AI generated content enforced through a mix of C2PA cryptographic provenance data and a system called ProofMode, meaning users either have to record a clip live inside the app itself or have it verified through a digital paper trail showing it actually came from a camera rather than a generator.

Divine is also built on Nostr, a decentralized protocol that identifies users by a cryptographic keypair rather than a traditional username or phone number tied to one company's servers. That means users theoretically own their content and following in a way that lets them move to other Nostr based services without starting over from zero, similar in spirit to how Bluesky and Mastodon already operate. The company has already attracted around 100,000 users according to CNN, and it's picked up its first brand partnership too, a Taco Bell tie in timed to the fast food chain bringing back four discontinued 2016 menu items as part of a nostalgia campaign.

The timing question looms fairly large over all of this though. Divine's own public code repository reportedly showed the team was still actively implementing more advanced C2PA support as recently as January this year, which leaves some real uncertainty about how airtight the AI detection system actually is at launch, particularly against something as simple as screen recording an AI generated video and re uploading the recording rather than the original file. Vine itself, for what it's worth, wasn't killed by its six second format, it died because Twitter never built a working creator monetization model and eventually cut the platform during a company wide financial crisis, a cautionary note worth keeping in mind for anyone hoping nostalgia alone carries this new attempt somewhere Vine's original 200 million monthly users couldn't

Is Vine back? Short-form video-sharing app Divine opens to publicwww.bbc.co.uk

[LatentSpace82]

The AI ban being the actual headline feature here rather than just a footnote says a lot about where the general public mood has shifted to over the past couple of years specifically. Being able to truly trust that a video is real again feels like it's becoming an actual selling point worth building an entire platform around, not just a nice to have afterthought