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

[RatedRMike93]

Jack Dorsey funding the spiritual rebirth of the exact platform his own company killed is such a specific kind of irony that it's almost funny. One commenter I saw elsewhere called him the moron who backs Vine after killing it himself, which feels a little harsh but not exactly wrong either

[Cached Stephen]

Curious how the Taco Bell partnership actually lands with the exact audience this app is trying to attract specifically. Feels like a slightly strange first brand deal for a platform explicitly positioning itself against algorithm driven, overly commercialized social media, even if the throwback menu angle does fit the overall nostalgia theme reasonably well

[AlignmentShark]

Building on Nostr instead of yet another closed, centralized platform is the detail that actually gives this a real shot at surviving longer term rather than just becoming another nostalgia flash in the pan that fades within a year. Owning your own content and follower graph independent of any single company is a actually different value proposition than what Vine originally offered back in its heyday

[AustinTheory18]

Vine's actual cause of death rarely gets mentioned accurately in most of these nostalgia pieces, it wasn't the six second format or any technical limitation at all, it was Twitter simply never building a real creator monetization system and then cutting the whole platform during a financial crisis. Worth remembering that specific lesson here, since a lack of monetization is exactly the kind of problem that could just as easily kill Divine down the road too

[Fox]

Recovering 2.5 million old Vine clips with the original engagement data intact is plainly the more impressive technical feat buried in this whole story. Cracking open years old, oddly packaged backup data files and correctly matching every single clip back to its original likes and comments sounds like a really tedious archival nightmare that somebody clearly put a huge amount of unglamorous work into

[Connor75]

100,000 users at launch is a properly solid start for a brand new app, though obviously an absolutely tiny fraction of Vine's peak 200 million monthly users at its height. The real test isn't the initial nostalgia driven signup wave at all, it's whether Divine can actually retain people and build fresh new content habits well past that first curious wave of downloads

[RayOfLight]

Screen recording as a workaround for the AI detection is the obvious hole everyone's going to poke at immediately, and it's a completely fair criticism. If someone just records their screen playing an AI generated clip and reuploads that recording, there's no original C2PA provenance metadata left to actually check against anymore