Is Vine back? Short-form video-sharing app Divine opens to publicThe app lets users create six-second looping videos and hosts more than two million classic videos.43 mins agoTechnology

Is Vine back? Short-form video-sharing app Divine opens to public.

Key points

• Jake Paul and Lele Pons are two of those who created their names on the platform before it was shut down by its owner Twitter in 2017.
• This person had a senior role at the social media platform when it purchased the Vine in 2012.
• Instead, 10, 000 individuals installed the app within its first few hours, overwhelming its servers.
• Divine's founder, former Twitter employee Evan Henshaw-Plath, informed the BBC he wanted to create the app as he felt social media needed "a reset".
• At its peak, Vine had more than 200 million monthly active users and supported launch the careers of some of the internet's biggest stars.

For context, a new app seen as a spiritual successor to short-form video service Vine has been published to the public.

Much like the original, Divine lets users create and share videos which are just six seconds long and repeat on a loop.

Meanwhile, the new app additionally hosts more than two million original Vine videos and – in a bid to further distance itself from other platforms – bans content produced by AI.

"I want to see it rival other apps because I think we have gone awry, " he remarked in an interview a few weeks before the public launch.

He remarked it was notable that there was no AI-generated content on Divine, adding he was "sick and tired of seeing videos and not knowing whether it was real".

"I want to be able to have fun and not have to second guess these things, " he remarked.

Divine is backed by Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey. This person had a senior role at the social media platform when it purchased the Vine in 2012.

It is built on a decentralised system called Nostr, meaning it is not controlled by a single firm in the same way as platforms such as TikTok or Instagram.

This means users can potentially take their accounts and content with them to other services that employ the same system, rather than being locked into one platform.

In practice, a similar approach has been applied by X rivals Bluesky and Mastodon.

Divine's website FAQs outlines a number of ways for the platform to ensure all videos on the app are human-made, without AI involvement.

For example, users have to record videos live in the app, rather than uploading from elsewhere, and it will employ a verification tool called ProofMode – which works like a digital receipt for a piece of media.

When users record something using a device with ProofMode, it can attach information which helps verify elements such as when it was recorded and whether the file has been altered since.

Users will additionally be able to flag suspected AI content, and automated systems as well as humans will be involved in looking for signs of the tech.

Divine's attempt to do things differently could additionally be its biggest challenge, according to social media analyst Matt Nevarra.

"The mechanisms people dislike about modern social media are often the same that made those platforms extraordinarily good at keeping people there, " he remarked.

"So Divine now has to prove you can remove some of the addiction without removing the magic."

Aside from its new content and features, the treasure trove of old Vines created by some of the platform's biggest stars could well be a draw for those who remember their first time around (and around).

Henshaw-Plath remarked he initially set out to simply recreate Vine's short-video format, but then wondered if he could bring back its old videos too.

He discovered the Internet Archive had preserved a copy of Vine's data and spent months reconstructing it.

"I was like, oh, this is really cool, " he remarked, initially expecting only a few thousand residents to be interested.

Instead, 10, 000 individuals installed the app within its first few hours, overwhelming its servers. "That's when I went, oh, there's something more here, " he remarked.

As to why individuals may still have interest in short-form content when numerous apps such as YouTube and TikTok have moved towards much longer videos, he compared Vine's format to the haiku. "We could do free-form prose, " he remarked.

"Yet poetry is a form in which we value and which has meaning. And so there's plenty of ways in which Vine was poetry."

Notably, the challenge for Divine is to turn that nostalgia into something that works for a new generation of social media users. Tributes to Vine as the video app shuts.

In short, is Vine back? Short-form video-sharing app Divine opens to publicThe app lets is the central thread here, and readers can expect follow-up reporting as the picture becomes clearer.