New App 'Devine' Revives Vine's Spirit With Restored Clips and AI Ban

A new social media app called Devine has launched, nearly a decade after the popular six-second video platform Vine was shut down. Devine is intentionally designed to emulate the simplicity of Vine, which gained widespread popularity for its looping videos before being shuttered by Twitter, now X, in 2017.

The platform's creator is Evan Henshaw-Plath, known online as Rabble, who was an early employee at Twitter. Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey is providing financial backing for the project, though he does not hold an ownership stake. This initiative brings back over two million classic Vine clips, allowing users to revisit content that significantly influenced internet culture in the 2010s.

Devine is being introduced at a time when there is a perceived growing nostalgia for an earlier internet, pre-dating the dominance of influencers, targeted advertising, and algorithm-driven feeds. This trend is also evident in renewed interest surrounding other retro digital brands, with recent discussions about a potential revival of Myspace following comments in a documentary.

Henshaw-Plath stated that part of the appeal of older social media platforms was the initial sense of 'hope and excitement' they inspired. Devine's team believes that excessive power concentration within a few large companies has negatively impacted current social networks. They aim to avoid creating another centralized platform where a small group controls the user experience. "Let's bring back the old content," Henshaw-Plath said. "Let's empower people to not have AI slop, and let's design it this way so that it can't be enshittified in the future."

Devine is taking a strong stance against artificial intelligence-generated content. The app requires users to record videos directly through its camera and employs technology to differentiate between camera-created and AI-generated material, with the latter being prohibited. The platform is built on Nostr, a decentralized, open-source protocol, which enables a different approach to platform governance compared to traditional social networks.

While not entirely against advertising, Devine's Chief Marketing Officer Alice Chan indicated that the company is open to ads but wants to avoid brands simply repurposing traditional advertisements into short videos. Taco Bell is among the brands that have begun testing the platform, participating in its 'Decades #TBTB Menu' campaign.