Built by a Twitter founding team member and backed by Jack Dorsey, Divine opens to everyone tomorrow with 2.5 million recovered Vine clips, a hard AI ban, and Taco Bell as its first brand deal.
Divine drops its invite codes and opens to the public on Thursday, August 20.
The six-second looping video app was built by Evan Henshaw-Plath, known online as Rabble, a member of Twitter’s founding team. It has financial backing from Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey.
It has no affiliation with Vine, Twitter, or X, and says so plainly.
How the AI ban actually works
Every outlet is reporting that Divine bans AI-generated content. Very few are explaining the enforcement, which is the part that decides whether the policy is real.
Users cannot simply upload an arbitrary file. A clip has to be recorded live inside the app, or the app inspects C2PA provenance metadata attached to the file, a kind of digital paper trail showing whether it came from a camera or a generator.
If it reads as AI-made, it gets blocked.
That is a technical check rather than a moderation promise, which puts Divine in a different category from platforms that say the same thing and rely on reports.
The 2.5 million Vine clips
Divine hosts more than 2.5 million original Vine videos, and getting them back was its own project.
Volunteers had archived Vine’s footage years ago in large, awkwardly structured data files. Rabble wrote his own program to open them and match each clip back to its original likes and comments.
Vine shut down in 2017. Nine years later the clips are browsable in a “classics” tab, with their engagement history intact.
Taco Bell is the first brand on board
Taco Bell is Divine’s first brand collaboration, timed to the chain’s Decades #TBTB menu, which brings back 2016 items nationwide on the same day Divine launches.
Fans can enter the code TACO-BELL in the app for early access ahead of tomorrow.
There is an obvious tension in an app built against ad algorithms opening its commercial chapter with a fast-food campaign, and Divine’s leadership has addressed it directly rather than dodging.
“This is much more than a collaboration about nostalgia,” said Alice Chan, Divine’s chief marketing officer. “It sets the standard for how we want brands to show up in Divine, in ways that are joyful, creative and a natural extension of the community, not an interruption to it.”
Chan has not ruled out advertising. The pitch to brands is native content made for the platform rather than repurposed ad creative, and she pointed to Home Depot’s old Vine account, with its deadpan warehouse-aisle sketches, as the model.
What Rabble says the app is for
His argument is about what the absence of an engagement algorithm does to what people make.
“By stripping away the pressure to create content that gets picked up by an ad algorithm, we’ve uncovered what it is that people actually want to create,” he said. “People are making loops fueled by an original idea and their desire to share with others, not because a recommendation engine is making them guess what will perform.”
Divine runs on the open Nostr protocol, which the company frames as giving creators ownership of their content, and it lets users choose their own algorithm.
Nine months of development, one archive resurrection, and a Crunchwrap tie-in. The app is in stores now, and the gates come down tomorrow.
Article compiled and edited by Derek Gibbs (entertainment editor) and the Clownfish TV newsroom.
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Hat Tips:
Digiday (August 19, 2026), the C2PA enforcement detail and the account of how the Vine archive was recovered
Divine and Taco Bell press releases (August 18, 2026), the launch date, quotes, and partnership terms
GamesBeat (August 18, 2026), Jack Dorsey’s backing and Rabble’s Twitter history