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

A new app that looks a lot like Vine is now out in public, and it is leaning hard into that comparison. Divine lets people make and share six-second videos that loop, just like the service that died in 2017, and it also comes with more than two million original Vine clips built in.

The app’s founder, former Twitter employee Evan Henshaw-Plath, says the point is a reset. He told the BBC he wants social media to feel less warped, and he is drawing a hard line against AI-made video. Users have to record inside the app instead of uploading from elsewhere, and Divine uses ProofMode, a tool that works like a digital receipt to help verify when something was recorded and whether it has been altered.

That anti-AI stance is not just branding. Divine says people can flag suspicious content, and both automated systems and humans will look for signs that a video was made by AI. Henshaw-Plath said he is tired of seeing clips where nobody can tell what is real, and wants an app where people can “have fun” without second-guessing every frame.

Divine is backed by Jack Dorsey and runs on Nostr, a decentralised system that means it is not controlled by a single company in the way TikTok or Instagram are. In theory, that lets people move accounts and content to other services on the same system instead of starting from scratch somewhere else. Bluesky and Mastodon use a similar idea.

The nostalgia angle may help. Henshaw-Plath said he first wanted to rebuild Vine’s short-video format, then found that the Internet Archive had preserved Vine data and spent months putting it back together. He expected only a few thousand people to care. Instead, 10,000 people installed Divine in its first few hours and the servers were overwhelmed. The harder part now is obvious: getting people to stay after the first hit of memory.