Divine plans public launch for August 20, with Taco Bell as first brand partner

Why it matters

Divine is testing whether an open social app can turn portable identities, human-made video and brand participation into a viable business without relying on conventional feed advertising.

Evan Henshaw-Plath (@rabble) and Liz Sweigart plan to open their six-second video app, Divine, to everyone on August 20, according to Divine's August 18 announcement. Divine also named Taco Bell as its first brand collaborator.

The pairing gives Henshaw-Plath, who goes by Rabble, an early test of how brands fit into a service designed to avoid conventional feed advertising. Divine says it bans AI-generated posts, lets users choose how their feeds are curated and runs on the Nostr protocol, an open protocol intended to keep identities and audiences portable. Taco Bell gets a channel for its latest exercise in internet nostalgia.

According to Divine's August 18 announcement, Taco Bell fans can enter the code TACO-BELL for early access before Divine plans to remove its invite requirement Thursday. The release does not disclose the value, duration, payment structure, scope or success metrics for the arrangement.

Divine says it wants brands to contribute creatively instead of interrupting communities with conventional advertising. Divine has not explained how that principle will translate into revenue or rules for future brand campaigns.

Rabble takes another run at open social media

Henshaw-Plath was the first employee and lead engineer at Odeo, the podcasting startup where Twitter was created. He worked on Twitter's early engineering before leading decentralized social projects.

Henshaw-Plath has worked on decentralized social projects including Planetary and Nos. His work has repeatedly returned to the question of who controls a social network's accounts, distribution and business model.

In a 2020 interview with the Initiative for Digital Public Infrastructure, Henshaw-Plath said early Twitter allowed nonemployees and former employees to contribute code. He said Twitter later adopted advertising and "had to get rid of some of its openness."

Divine applies that experience to a deliberately narrow format. Henshaw-Plath began exploring a Vine-style service after listening to a podcast about the original app and discussing its creative culture on his Revolution.Social podcast. The resulting product preserves the six-second constraint while replacing a centralized account system with Nostr identities and distributed relays.

Divine's account of its origins says the goal is to prevent another corporation from erasing a creative archive or trapping a creator's audience inside one service. Users cryptographically sign posts, and an identity can work across other Nostr applications. Divine also says users can select among feed algorithms instead of accepting one engagement-optimized ranking system.

Henshaw-Plath's thesis rests on constraints as a source of creativity. "People are making loops fueled by an original idea and their desire to share with others," he said in the August 18 release.

An open launch after an invite-gated debut

Divine has been downloadable since April 29, when it reached Apple's App Store, Google Play and the Nostr-focused Zapstore. That release still required invitation codes. The August 18 release says Divine plans to remove the access gate on August 20; Taco Bell's code provides early entry before then.

The app includes stop-motion tools, an "Inspired By" feature for responding to other creators, tipping and separate experiences called Divine Kids and Divine Greenlight. TechCrunch reported that Divine accepts videos recorded inside the app or verified through the C2PA content-provenance standard as part of its restriction on AI-generated uploads, and that the app was available as a free download.

Co-founder Liz Sweigart brings the trust-and-safety side of that design. Sweigart studied teen autonomy, privacy and online safety as a postdoctoral fellow in computer science at Vanderbilt University after a career that included serving as a PwC partner and co-founding Safe Kids AI. "We've focused on making Divine more creative, collaborative, and human by giving people more ways to make, respond, and participate vs. only consuming what an algorithm puts in front of them," Sweigart said in the August 18 release.

Open infrastructure creates its own moderation tradeoffs. Divine can remove material from the experience it operates, while copies distributed through independent Nostr relays may remain available elsewhere. Portability protects creators from a platform owner; it can also limit that owner's ability to make content disappear across the network.

Taco Bell tests the anti-ad sales pitch

Taco Bell's role is tied to its Decades #TBTB campaign, which brings four products associated with its 2016 menu back nationwide on August 20 for a limited time.

The timing is tidy: Vine culture and the returning menu items both trade on memories of the mid-2010s internet.

The Taco Bell activation gives Divine a manageable first case because the campaign fits its six-second nostalgia. It does not establish how Divine will handle brands whose products lack that cultural overlap, how much brand material users will tolerate or how either party will judge the campaign. No public terms answer those questions.

Divine's FAQ says initial funding came through a grant from And Other Stuff, an open-technology organization backed by Jack Dorsey. The FAQ says the grant was not an investment and that Dorsey holds no equity or ownership in Divine. The grant size, total funding and any other backers have not been disclosed.

TechCrunch reported at the April app-store release that Divine was structured as a public benefit corporation and had no revenue model. Creator tipping provides a direct-payment feature, and Divine's explanation of its Nostr architecture points to Bitcoin-based micropayments. The Taco Bell arrangement adds a possible brand-funded path, though the release does not say who pays whom or what Taco Bell receives beyond early-access participation.

Divine's FAQ separately lists approximately 170,000 archived videos and approximately 62,000 creator accounts; it says access to archived Vine accounts is not currently available while Divine develops a recovery system. TechCrunch cited roughly 500,000 videos from nearly 100,000 original creators in April. Divine's August release separately claims more than 2.5 million Vine classics. The sources use different labels and totals, and Divine has not publicly reconciled them.

Other basic operating figures remain unavailable. Divine has not disclosed users, retention, revenue, annual recurring revenue, headcount or growth. That leaves investors and prospective partners without the figures needed to judge whether the archive is converting nostalgia into sustained use.

Divine enters a crowded market for alternatives to recommendation-heavy short-video feeds. Nostr gives it a different technical base from Skylight Social, which runs on the AT Protocol. Neptune lets creators hide likes and follower totals, while private social network Yope raised $12.3 million in July, bringing its reported total funding to $20 million. Divine's six-second limit, restored archive, AI restrictions and portable Nostr identities give it a distinct product, though none supplies a business model on its own.

The anti-AI position also arrives as synthetic media is becoming routine on larger platforms. The Associated Press reported that TikTok had labeled at least 1.3 billion AI-generated clips. Divine is betting that provenance checks and a human-made-content rule can attract creators and viewers tired of sorting through them.

The larger test begins after the nostalgia campaign ends. Henshaw-Plath has spent years arguing that open protocols can give people durable identities and more control over distribution. Divine's planned public rollout and brand experiment will test whether those principles can support regular use and enough revenue to keep the service operating.