A new app seen as a spiritual successor to short-form video service Vine has been released to the public.<\/p>\n
Much like the original, Divine lets users create and share videos which are just six seconds long and repeat on a loop. <\/p>\n
The new app also hosts more than two million original Vine videos and – in a bid to further distance itself from other platforms – bans content made by AI.<\/p>\n
Divine’s founder, former Twitter employee Evan Henshaw-Plath, told the BBC he wanted to create the app because he felt social media needed “a reset”.<\/p>\n
“I want to see it rival other apps because I think we have gone awry,” he said in an interview a few weeks before the public launch.<\/p>\n
He said it was important 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”.<\/p>\n
“I want to be able to have fun and not have to second guess these things,” he said.<\/p>\n
At its peak, Vine had more than 200 million monthly active users and helped launch the careers of some of the internet’s biggest stars.<\/p>\n
Jake Paul and Lele Pons are two of those who made their names on the platform before it was shut down <\/a>by its owner Twitter in 2017.<\/p>\n Divine is backed by Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey, who had a senior role at the social media platform when it purchased the Vine in 2012.<\/p>\n It is built on a decentralised system called Nostr, meaning it is not controlled by a single company in the same way as platforms such as TikTok or Instagram.<\/p>\n This means users can potentially take their accounts and content with them to other services that use the same system, rather than being locked into one platform.<\/p>\n