2026-07-10 –, Open Social Space
Divine began as an attempt to bring back Vine, but quickly turned into something much bigger: a decentralized, human-first social video platform built to resist enshittification, AI slop, and centralized control. Since its announcement, the project has drawn massive attention — from hundreds of thousands of curious users and former Vine creators to coverage in outlets like TechCrunch, The Guardian, and TechRadar — revealing a deep hunger for a more creative, user-owned internet.
Divine started as an attempt to bring back Vine videos.
But while rebuilding that experience, we ran into a much larger question: why does social media keep getting worse?
The current generation of social platforms is built around centralized control — over identity, algorithms, moderation, archives, and distribution. Users create the culture, but corporations ultimately own the relationships. Over time, every platform becomes optimized not for human creativity or community, but for engagement, extraction, and control.
At the same time, we’re entering a world increasingly flooded with AI-generated media, synthetic influencers, algorithmic manipulation, and systems designed to maximize attention at the expense of trust.
Divine is an experiment in building something different.
The project combines short-form social video with decentralized infrastructure, open protocols, portable identity, open-source software, and user-controlled moderation and algorithms. We’re also exploring ways to integrate authenticity technologies — including cryptographic media verification tools originally developed for journalists and human rights activists — into everyday social media.
This talk is about the philosophy behind the project and the lessons learned from the first generation of social platforms.
Topics include:
- why centralized social media inevitably “enshittifies”
- the dangers of algorithmic monoculture
- why social media governance should resemble communities rather than dictatorships
- how portability and federation change power dynamics
- authenticity and trust in the age of generative AI
- what we learned from Twitter, Vine, and the early social web
- why fun, creativity, and weird internet culture matter politically
More than nostalgia for Vine, Divine is an attempt to imagine social media infrastructure that cannot easily be captured by corporations, billionaires, or engagement algorithms.
Not a perfect system.
Not a utopia.
Just an attempt to build social tools that users can actually own, govern, fork, and survive beyond any single company or founder.
Rabble (Evan Henshaw-Plath) is a technologist, activist, and one of the original members of the Twitter founding team, where he helped build the platform in its earliest days after previously working on activist communication networks like Indymedia and TXTmob. Today he is the creator of Divine, an open-source decentralized social video platform exploring how social media can be rebuilt around user ownership, authenticity, and community governance rather than centralized corporate control.