Jack Dorsey, the founder and former owner of Twitter/X, has announced the launch of Divine (stylized as diVine), a new version of Vine.
Vine was a popular video social media app launched in 2013, which gained rapid viral success, particularly among teen users, before losing viewership and being shut down in 2017. Vine was the first major short-form video app, and it became the basis for apps like Musicly and later TikTok. While the new diVine has some changes, it is meant to be a new version of the original app, and over 100,000 of the original videos have been ported over to create a content base for the new app.
The site is not yet available for download, only being hosted as a web app currently. It’s being hosted through Nostr (Notes and Other Stuff Transmitted by Relays, typically NOSTR, stylized as Nostr), a decentralized open-source system designed to allow easy communication while preventing digital censorship. (Dorsey has long been considered a free speech absolutist when it comes to digital censorship, with many speculating the moderation on Twitter/X under his leadership being the minimum necessary to keep the platform making money.)
All Nostr programs, including diVine, are based on public-key cryptography, a form of digital encoding that theoretically allows content to be publicly verifiable. Full disclosure: I do not understand the technical aspects of how this works, so I will not be diving too far into the theory or practicality of it. I’m only bringing this up because it forms the basis for one of diVine’s major promises: to be the first major social media platform fully free of AI content.
diVine promises to use public-key cryptography to provide “cryptographic video authenticity” via “cryptographic signatures” based on an analysis of the video’s metadata. This is a process diVine is calling ProofMode. Again, I do not understand how the technical side of this works.
However, it should, in theory, provide four verification levels: Verified Mobile, Verified Web, Basic Proof, and Unverified. Verified Mobile is theoretically able to verify from video creation that it was captured by a real camera. Verified Web allows for certain categories of web or desktop content that might be missing certain steps in the metadata. Basic Proof ensures that the video has not been modified, but cannot verify how it was generated or captured. Unverified means that either verification failed or no proof was provided. It’s currently unclear what the minimum standard for posting. Additionally, they do clarify that this should prevent deepfakes, but cannot prevent human-generated misinformation.
It is yet unclear how popular diVine will be or if it will catch on. The current lack of a mobile app certainly does provide complications for a vertical-format short-form video platform. Given the current number of videos on the platform, it’s entirely possible no new content has been added (save for the original videos ported over onto the new site).
Two of the three ways of searching (trending and new videos) produced no results. New videos had a message reading “No recent videos: Check back soon for new videos”, while the trending page had a picture of the drag queen Divine captioned “Divine needs a rest: Check back soon for new videos”. (Divine is the famous drag queen who inspired the character design for Ursula from the animated movie “The Little Mermaid”.)
On the one searchable page that did have content (hashtags), the top hashtag, “#vine”, has only 3,760 videos. The 50th most popular hashtag, “#fun”, drops to 475 videos, and if you search through the top 200 hashtags, #200, “#bestvines”, has 186 videos and no thumbnail (or at least no thumbnail loaded for me). Additionally, several of the hashtags shared a thumbnail video. “#bangtanboys” (#46), “#jimin” (#14), and “#bts” (#2) all have a thumbnail of a blonde balayage half-up hairstyle from behind captioned “feeling good when your hair looks cute”. Others also had repeated thumbnails, though this one was a little more obvious.
I did click on the “#jimin” page, just to see what was there. I had wanted to watch a couple of videos anyway, to get a sense of how it worked, and decided that if I was referencing the video above, I wanted to credit the creator. However, when I clicked on “#jimin”, it took me to a page that said there were 0 videos available with that hashtag. According to the hashtag page on Discovery, there were 1,038. (I’ve included screenshots below just so people know I am not going crazy.)
With such a low usability (between the lack of a mobile app, the limited content, and the apparent inability to watch videos), it is entirely unclear if diVine stands a real shot of gaining back Vine’s popularity – a potential further complicated by its main userbase having aged out of its target demographics and the existence of prominent competitors, such as TikTok. However, after 8 years of absence, Vine is back, and is promising to be the first AI-free social media platform.
