Safer social media use starts with conversation.
Divine can help families reduce some risks and build healthier habits around social media use, but no app can replace conversation, supervision, and thoughtful boundaries at home.
This page is a starting point for parents, guardians, and teens—not a contract, not a control panel, and not a replacement for Divine's Terms, Privacy Policy, Safety Standards, Kids Policy, or reporting tools. It's the stuff we wish more apps said out loud.
A simple framing
Pause
Notice what's happening before you react. For teens, that's catching the urge to scroll. For parents, that's catching the urge to confiscate.
Reflect
Ask, don't assume. What did you see? How did it land? Is something here worth paying attention to?
Redirect
Pick the next step together—a setting to try, a person to mute, a break to take, a thing to do off the app.
This framing is drawn from peer-reviewed research on youth online safety.
The guides
Talking with your teen
How to keep the conversation open—plus starters that work better than interrogations.
Creating a family media plan
Build a plan together for where, when, and how your household uses media—and revisit it as kids grow.
When something goes wrong
Four steps for the moment your child sees something upsetting—and when to escalate.
Understanding content settings
How adult-content gating, filters, blocking, muting, and reporting work on Divine—and their limits.
What Divine can and can't do
We'd rather be useful than impressive. Here's the real picture of what the app side can help with—and where conversation, supervision, and human judgment still have to do the work.
What Divine offers
- Moderation tools that remove clearly prohibited content from Divine-controlled surfaces.
- Reporting tools inside the app so anyone can flag content or accounts for review.
- Content settings that gate adult and sensitive content for accounts that haven't opted in.
- Blocking, muting, and filtering controls so users can shape their own experience.
- A support path for families and a published safety standards page that documents what we will and won't do.
What Divine can't promise
- No app—including Divine—can guarantee a teen will never see adult, upsetting, or harmful content.
- Automated systems and human review both miss things. We don't claim to catch every violation.
- Bad language and conflict happen in human communities. We don't promise a filter that removes all of it.
- Divine is built on an open protocol (Nostr). Content removed from Divine-controlled surfaces can still exist elsewhere on the network.
- Settings and tools work best as part of a household conversation—not as a substitute for one.
For the full policy view, see our Safety Standards.
Divine is in the app stores. If you want to try it alongside your teen, start here.
Rabble + Pam Wisniewski / STIR
The framing on this page—conversation over punishment, co-navigation over surveillance, pause and redirect over hard control—comes out of years of research from teams like the Socio-Technical Interaction Research (STIR) Lab.
Dr. Pamela Wisniewski and the STIR Lab study how teens, families, and online services actually interact. Their consistent finding: heavy-handed monitoring and punitive control tend to push teens away from the adults who want to help them. Teens fare better when they're trusted enough to participate in the rules, and when caregivers stay in conversation through the rough patches.
Rabble—Divine's co-founder—talks with researchers like Pam Wisniewski about what non-punitive, conversation-first online safety actually looks like in practice. The values on this page are why we build the way we do.
Watch: Rabble + Pam Wisniewski on non-punitive online safety
Prefer to read? Open the episode on YouTube.
More from the STIR Lab
The most effective online-safety strategy is rarely a tougher filter. It's a household where it's safe to bring something weird, scary, or embarrassing back to the adults.
But you don't have to take our word for it
These are some resources we recommend. Inclusion here doesn't imply endorsement of every recommendation from these organizations. Read them with the same critical eye you'd bring to any single source—including this one. A few are global; most are from North American or UK sources.
Plans you can fill out together
AAP Family Media Plan
American Academy of Pediatrics tool for building a household plan together, room by room and screen by screen.
eSafety Commissioner (Australia)—Family Tech Agreement
A downloadable family tech-agreement template from Australia's online-safety regulator—same shape as the AAP plan, written to work for any household.
WHO—Helping Adolescents Thrive
The World Health Organization's framework for adolescent well-being—strategies for parents, educators, and health workers, written for a global audience.
Family guidance and conversation tools
Common Sense Media—Parents' Guide to Social Media
Plain-language explainers, age-by-age guidance, and reviews of the apps teens actually use.
Internet Matters (UK)
UK-based equivalent of Common Sense Media—app-by-app guides, age-by-age advice, and practical online-safety tools for parents.
ConnectSafely Parent Guides
Short, practical guides to specific apps and online-safety topics, written for non-technical caregivers.
Family Online Safety Institute (FOSI)
Research, policy work, and family resources focused on a culture of responsibility in the connected world.
Children and Screens
Research-backed resources from the Institute of Digital Media and Child Development on how screens shape child development, with practical guidance for parents and educators.
Screen Sanity
Parent-to-parent guidance—conversation starters, family templates, and decision frameworks for navigating screens at every age.
Reporting harms or getting help
INHOPE
Global network of reporting hotlines—find the right place to report illegal online content in your country.
Child Helpline International
Directory of crisis helplines for kids and teens by country—for the moments when your child needs to talk to someone right now.
Thorn for Parents
Thorn is a nonprofit that builds technology and research to defend children from online sexual abuse. Their parents' site offers conversation-first guidance on tough topics like sextortion, grooming, and nudes.
Divine is in the app stores. If you want to try it alongside your teen, start here.
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This page is part of Divine's commitment to being honest about what apps can and can't do for families. It's not legal advice, clinical advice, or a substitute for talking to the people in your home. If you have feedback or want to suggest a resource, reach out through Divine support.