It can feel like everywhere we look it’s bad news—just bummer after bummer headline as the world slides into an AI-fueled dystopia—but for once, this week, we got some very exciting news.
Vine is coming back, and it’s going to be an AI-free zone.
That’s right: as it turns out, we can have nice, unhinged, and totally unserious things. It’s really starting to feel like 2012 in here, and we like it.
The new version of Vine (the original was shuttered in 2016) has been rebranded as deVine and is being backed by Twitter cofounder Jack Dorsey’s nonprofit And Other Stuff, which formed in May 2025.
Speaking with TechCrunch, Evan Henshaw-Plath, an early Twitter employee and member of And Other Stuff, said the idea came from a desire to do something nostalgic. “Can we do something that takes us back, that lets us see those old things, but also lets us see an era of social media where you could either have control of your algorithms, or you could choose who you follow, and it’s just your feed, and where you know that it’s a real person that recorded the video?” he recalled asking.
They then began assembling deVine using content saved by the Archive Team, which included “150,000 to 200,000 of the videos from about 60,000 of the creators.”
But deVine isn’t just a nostalgia play—it’s a forward-thinking platform in that it will not allow AI-generated content. The company is using tech from the human-rights nonprofit the Guardian Project, TechCrunch reports.
So: old videos we love and new content that isn’t AI slop? Sounds like heaven. To celebrate this news, we’re taking a stroll back through time to revisit some of our favorite gay (and gay-ish) Vines. Oh, what a time to be alive.
