Remember Vine, the OG video sharing app that basically paved the way for Instagram and the rest? Well, it’s back, or at least something close to it. The new version is called Divine, and it comes with a rule that feels quaint: the videos have to be made by people, not machines.

Vine user meagancignoli once got 178 million views. Now she has 17 followers on Divine.

Back in 2013, Vine helped define short video on the internet. The videos were about six seconds long and looped endlessly. Even given these constrains, however, Vine It moved fast and didn’t ask permission. At its peak it reached about 100 million users and turned unknown creators into minor celebrities, including Logan Paul. Then it stalled. Jack Dorsey sold it into Twitter and by 2017 it was gone.

Now Dorsey is backing a return. Divine keeps the six second limit. It is actually adding about 500,000 old clips and letting users post new ones, but with a condition none of it be AI generated. If you want to post, you either shoot inside the app or prove you made it yourself.

That rule is not random. Feeds are filling up with low grade AI video. One recent study suggests more than a fifth of what new users see on YouTube falls into that category. The result is a strange sameness, content that looks polished but feels empty.

Divine started as a side project by Evan Henshaw-Plath aka Rabble as a place to store old Vines. The response pushed it further. Now it is live to the public, funded in part through Dorsey’s nonprofit work in open social media.

There is also a second idea under this, however. Dorsey has said before that Vine never found a business model. This time, the pitch is that creators keep ownership of their work and their audience, and build their own revenue streams from there. It sounds good, but it runs into the same hard truth that killed Vine the first time. Attention is easy to get, money is not and selling advertising against six second fart videos is tough.

Further, Vine is old news. TikTok has scale that Vine never reached. Meta pushes Reels across its apps. Shorts on YouTube pull in hundreds of billions of views each day. These systems reward volume, not restraint. Have 500,000 old Vines is a nice start but a service like Divine needs millions of views per day to compete at all with the incumbents.

Obviously Divine is trying something different. It is betting that people are tired of synthetic content, and that a small, strict format can still matter. Maybe it works as a refuge. Maybe it stays a niche.

There is a sense of regret hanging over this return. Vine was sold too early. It lost its shape inside a larger company. Now the same people are trying again, but the internet has changed. The question is whether anyone still wants six seconds of something real, when everything else is louder, longer, and easier to fake.