Vine, the short-form video app introduced in 2012, died as it lived: confusing people who didn’t use it, even as evidence of its influence surrounded them. It turned everyday people into stars on other platforms and beyond. Its musical whims warped the music industry. It cultivated memes that might have been dismissed as inside jokes if not for their tendency to flourish outside the app.

It was imitated by much larger competitors and, in death, served as a template for a new, similarly puzzling and even more powerful generation of short-form video apps. Its end, announced in 2016, was a muddled one: Was Vine mismanaged by Twitter, its parent company? Did it fail to support its most popular users? Did its novelty wear off? All of the above?

Twitter euthanized Vine before other services had time to kill it, leaving Viners, and their fans, to disperse. As much as apps like TikTok owe to Vine, none provided anything like continuity, leaving some Vine users with the feeling that something was still missing from the internet.

“The idea was to bring back what people remember about Vine, even if it isn’t necessarily the way that Vine was,” said Dom Hofmann, a founder of Vine, in a phone interview. His new app, Byte, was released in January.