As Vine’s successor opens its doors to the public, chalupas may make all the difference

If you’ve been waiting for Vine to return ever since its demise a decade ago, get ready for some Divine intervention. A new video sharing service backed by former Twitter chief Jack Dorsey is now open to the public, and Taco Bell has come on board as the app’s first official brand partner.

Over the years, numerous attempts have been revive Vine, but Divine is different. It burst onto the scene earlier this year with a leadership team filled with Twitter vets and a strict no-AI policy. Because Divine is closely linked to the company that was Vine’s parent, it can serve as an archive of the influential app while simultaneously inspiring new forms of six-second creativity.

The activity on Divine during its invite-only period epitomized the app’s people-centric approach. A press release announcing Divine’s public launch didn’t allude to any traffic numbers or revenue figures. Instead, Co-Founder and CEO Evan Henshaw-Plath — who goes by the pseudonym Rabble — has highlighted creative endeavors like the “Late Night Insomniacs Club.”

“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,” Rabble said in a statement. “That’s the magic of Divine. 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. We are starting a movement to make social media feel creative, joyful and human again.”

Like many of Jack Dorsey’s recent projects, Divine is built on a decentralized, open protocol. That means the app is free from the traditional “walled garden” approach to social media, wherein tech companies control the accounts on their platforms. “Open protocols give people greater control over their identity and content instead of locking them into a single platform,” Dorsey said in a statement. “That foundation matters if we want a more open social internet and a future where creators have real ownership over what they build.”

Unbounded creativity, user freedom, and no AI all sound nice, but they don’t pay the bills, and that brings us to the $64,000 question: How will Divine avoid the central issue that led to its predecessor’s downfall? Vine was a cultural touchstone, but even its biggest stars struggled to monetize

their six-second clips. If Divine will eschew the interruptive ads that form the foundation of monetization on other social media apps, how will its creators generate enough revenue to stick around?

Enter Taco Bell. The fast food chain is launching a Decades menu filled with discontinued items that were available in 2016. What better way to promote that menu than by teaming up with the hottest social media app of the mid-2010s? The code TACO-BELL provides early access to Divine ahead of its public launch on August 20.

For brands that want to activate on Divine, the Taco Bell campaign is a shining example. Divine’s press release advises brands to “contribute creatively to the communities they enter” rather than interrupting them, and amid a creator marketing boom, that strategy is already everywhere. Several of Taco Bell’s competitors, like Chipotle and Taco John’s, have recently launched activations alongside creators. Divine can put those collaborations into a space that feels organic and human-driven.

And then there’s the nostalgia factor. While nostalgia has always been a driving force online, it has recently become a hot topic among Big Tech firms. Those companies want to harken back to the days when discovery felt surprising and feeds weren’t dominated by omnipotent algorithms. Divine, an inherently nostalgic app, is perfectly positioned to be part of that movement. If brands want to get on board for the trip to the past, the new platform can set them up for success.

So Divine won’t just address Vine’s monetization struggles — it will look to innovate brand-creator collaborations. If you want to see what the app’s community looks like at launch, you can fire up that Taco Bell code and check it out.