There’s a New Vine Reboot That Wants to Ban AI Content

When the world needed Vine most, it vanished. 

More specifically, in January 2017, Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey shut down Vine after years of steadily declining profits and users. All in all, the platform that allowed people to post six-second video clips was only operational for four years — a scrappy startup that was purchased by Twitter before it even launched a usable app.  But in its short lifespan, Vine defined an era of internet culture, creating celebrities like King Bach, Lele Pons, Shawn Mendez, and Rudy Mancuso and minting catchphrases, slang, and memes that are still in rotation today. Its short-form scroll format was recreated in apps like Musical.ly and TikTok, which have made their own internet stars. But something magically about Vine was lost in the process. 

There’s a certain enduring sentimentality around Vine that still exists today, Evan Henshaw-Plath — or Rabble as he’s known online — tells Rolling Stone. Henshaw-Plath, a self-described “activist-turned-technologist,” was the first employee when Twitter was known as Odeo, a podcasting platform, and hired Dorsey. He left the company in 2006, before Twitter’s official launch, and has worked at various startups since.

“With Vine, you don’t have unlimited video. You have to compress the storytelling down into six seconds,” Henshaw-Plath says. “They need to distill things down to the essence. And I think there’s something pure about that.” He now hosts the podcast Revolution.social, a project interviewing tech experts and founders on the myriad ideas around the future of social media. Each guest has different expertise, but the same thing kept happening in their conversations. “Vine kept coming up,” Henshaw-Plath says. “There was an energy there.” But in April 2025, he had an idea, one that people agreed with. Something about Vine was special. But did it have to stay in the past? 

This was the start of deVine, a new app started by Henshaw-Plath and funded by Dorsey that is hoping to bring Vine back to audiences old and new. The prototype already has over 10,000 videos archived from Vine before it shut down, but is also including tech from software nonprofit the Guardian Project to prevent any AI generated content. While the name is different, much of deVine’s programming is meant to harken back to the app’s glory days, while offering new users special tech additions to make it an escape from current social platforms. The Vine reboot is still in beta testing, but hit its max limit of users in just a few hours — and there’s still 145,000 people on the waitlist. There’s an obvious level of nostalgia deVine is tapping into for social media users. But Henshaw-Plath tells Rolling Stone he thinks the excitement over this new app is less about the return of an old friend and more about people feeling a lack of control over the apps that define their lives. 
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“There’s a real frustration with the existing platforms. It feels like AI is being shoved down our throat,” Henshaw-Plath says. “We need to reclaim social media by and for people.” 

Vine’s success can’t be extricated from the lofi social media world in which the app existed. Monetization for social accounts was virtually non-existent at the time, so some of Vine’s biggest creatives were easily lured away when large tech companies began to promote the idea of getting paid for your work on sites like Instagram and YouTube. But before there was cash, the app was home for some of the silliest, nonsensical videos that quickly became inescapable internet vernacular— like the “Why you always lyin” meme, “Eyebrows on fleek,” “Broom broom,” or the quintessential battle cry “Do it for the Vine.” 

“Vine existed in a world where you became a star, not because you gained the algorithm, but because you published stuff, and you cultivated a community of people who wanted to see your things,” he says. “It’s a world where you’re not seeing an ad every third post, you get to see the people you actually want to follow, and where you have to create and distill things down. That is what people remember about Vine and what we’re trying to bring back.” 
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Resurrecting a short-lived but beloved app is a fun idea. But in order to turn that spark of intrigue into a reality, Henshaw-Plath needed help. Dorsey’s nonprofit, “and Other Stuff,” financed the project in May. And according to Henshaw-Plath, a community project called Archive Team had banded together in 2017 to make a copy of Vine before the app went away entirely. Volunteers saved close to 10,000 videos, but they were stored in giant 40gb files that couldn’t be navigated by the average user. It took months for Henshaw-Plath to not only restore one video at a time, but also reconstruct some of the biggest Viners accounts. 

While bringing back as much of Vine’s archive is important to Henshaw-Plath, he says that much of his work is also focused on enshittification-proofing the app. (The term enshittification, coined by researcher Cory Doctorow, describes how  the internet is getting worse as tech companies put profits over user experience.) For Henshaw-Plath, a major part of that involves preventing any AI-generating content from being posted on the site. 

“It just blew me away that so many people in Silicon Valley are embracing AI and AI generated content without asking people if we want it. They’re just like, ‘Look at these slick videos of the dancing crab or shrimp Jesus. Maybe because these videos are tricking people into viewing it a lot, maybe that’s what people really want,’” he says. People don’t really want that. We want human connection.” 
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There’s still a lot of work to be done before deVine will be out of beta testing. Henshaw-Plath and his team are currently in touch with old Vine creators to discuss whether they want their old accounts restored or taken down entirely. There’s also the problem of sorting through the data and making sure the videos are accessible with the right credit and creator, which adds research hours to the task of populating deVine with Vine’s back catalog. All of these have to be tackled before questions about things like monetization and ads can be addressed. But Henshaw-Plath says while the project is far from finished, he’s excited about the possibility of giving audiences a platform that tries to work in their best interest. 

“Social media should be fun, and we need more fun in our lives. We need ways to laugh. It doesn’t have to be doom scrolling,” Henshaw-Plath tells Rolling Stone. “We can have social media that takes us back to that feeling of joy.”