Divine, a new short-form video app promoted as a spiritual successor to Vine, has launched with six-second looping videos and a focus on authentic content.
Like the original Vine platform, Divine lets users create, share and replay videos lasting up to six seconds.
The Vine-inspired app also includes more than 2 million original Vine videos and prohibits AI-generated content, setting it apart from many other social media platforms.
Divine founder and former Twitter employee Evan Henshaw-Plath told the BBC that he created the app because he believes social media needs a “reset”.
“We want to compete with other apps because we think we’ve gone down the wrong path,” he said in an interview conducted several weeks before the launch.
Henshaw-Plath said Divine’s ban on AI-generated videos is important because users should be able to trust what they see online. “I’m tired of watching a video and not knowing if it’s real or not,” he said.
“I want to have fun and not have to second-guess these things,” he added.
At its peak, Vine attracted more than 200 million monthly active users and helped launch the careers of some of the internet’s biggest creators.
Jake Paul and Lele Pons were among the stars who gained fame on Vine before Twitter, which owned the service, shut it down in 2017.
Divine is backed by Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey, who held a senior position at the company when it acquired Vine in 2012.
The app runs on Nostr, a decentralized social media protocol that is not controlled by one central company in the way TikTok and Instagram are.
Because Divine is built on a decentralized system, users may be able to move their accounts and content to other services that support the same protocol instead of being tied to a single platform.
Bluesky and Mastodon use similar decentralized approaches, offering alternatives to traditional, centrally controlled social networks.
Source: www.bbc.co.uk