Dancing bananas are back as social media site Hyves relaunches

Once the biggest social network in the Netherlands, Hyves has come back online after 13 years.

The “gezelligste platform” in the Netherlands has been relaunched by owners Mediahuis, which hopes to tap into nostalgia and distrust of American social media companies.

First launched by a group of Dutch friends in 2004 who wanted to share photos, Hyves hit its peak in 2010 with 10 million users, more than half of the country’s population.

The same year it was acquired by Mediahuis Netherlands, which also owns the newspapers De Telegraaf and NRC

Users soon began to abandon the site to a new social networking site, Facebook, and by 2013, the site was offline. The games section of the website lived on as Hyves Games.

“Hyves wants to do things differently,” Mediahuis said in a statement. The group promises to keep users’ data within Europe and will not use algorithms to determine what content people see.

The site’s infamous dancing banana will also return.

New accounts will be limited to 10,000 on the first day and 5,000 every day after. Mediahuis hopes to have 1.5 million users by the end of the year.