Lazia, 23 September 2026 — The Ministry of Digital Affairs has noted the return of Hyves with interest, and said it intends to open a Mahusetan presence on the Dutch social network at the earliest opportunity.
Hyves came back online on 22 September, nearly thirteen years after it was shut down. The relaunch is the work of the media group Mediahuis, which has brought the network back as both a website and an app.
Its operators say the platform runs on European technical architecture, is hosted in Europe and does not pass user data to third parties. They have also promised fewer intrusive advertisements, no algorithmic ranking and no endless scroll, on the principle that a social network should first of all be social.
"A network that is hosted where its users actually live, that does not rank them, and that does not sell them on, is the kind of thing this ministry has spent years asking for," the ministry said. "It would be a poor look to ask for it and then not turn up."
The interest is consistent with the ministry's position in June, when it condemned American restrictions on foreign access to advanced language models as "platform panic dressed up as strategic prudence" and argued that digital infrastructure should not become a geopolitical rationing system.
Hyves was founded in 2004 and at its height, around 2010 and 2011, carried more than ten million accounts in a country of some sixteen million. It was bought by Telegraaf Media Group for €43.7m in 2010 and closed at the end of 2013, by which point its users had moved to Facebook.
Quite when a Mahusetan account appears is not entirely in the Confederation's hands. Registration is being released in stages, reported by DutchNews as ten thousand new accounts on the first day and five thousand a day thereafter, with the operators aiming at 1.5 million users by the end of the year.
The ministry said the account would carry official notices in Dutch and English, alongside the national website whose beta it has targeted for Christmas Eve. It did not say which body would hold the account, or who would be writing for it.
The relaunch also restores krabbels, the short public messages left on another user's page, along with glitter images and the dancing banana. Asked whether the Confederation intended to post any of those, the ministry said only that it would observe local custom.
