This is my (lightning) talk submission about Nyves for the Archives, Libraries, and Digital Memory devroom at FOSDEM 2027.
https://aldm-devroom.github.io/cfp/
Abstract
In April 2026, I started working on the idea of bringing back old Hyves profiles from the Dutch social network Hyves, which shut down in 2013.
There is a huge public data archive with content archived by The Archive Team: https://wiki.archiveteam.org/index.php/Hyves. I am processing this dataset into Nostr events to distribute across multiple relays. What you see at the nyves.nl domain is the client fetching the data from those relays to build all the components of a profile. At the time of this writing, processing all the usernames (9+ million) has just finished. The next step is to process avatars, custom profile design assets, and names. The Nyves client is not restricted to those profiles alone; it also loads (much richer) profiles from the Nostrverse and Fediverse.
My goal is to bring back the social network Hyves and the authentic feeling of social media using Nyves: social media where connection comes first, where your friends and their content come first. Social media without third parties-the platforms-doing all they can to grab as much attention as possible for commercial interests.
In this lightning talk, I will show where Nyves is currently at and share technical details about how things work behind the client.
Biography
Sebastian (39) is an independent creative/full-stack web developer and the maintainer of the Nostr-PHP library, supported by OpenSats (with a one-year grant in 2024). Besides this project, he is also contributing by developing Nostr modules for Drupal. Sebastian is also one of the co-founders of the nonprofit Web of Trust Foundation, hosted in the Netherlands, which is building the TEPP protocol and a YouTube Kids reference application: https://kubo.watch. Another side project is Nyves (https://nyves.nl), which aims to bring back a Dutch social network called Hyves using Nostr with more than 9 million profiles.
“Since I've been online (1998), I've been highly interested in online communities, social networking and new ways of digital interaction. The internet has changed radically in the last decade, and that change is not serving our interests. It's fair to say the web is broken in many ways. With Nostr, we can fix this.”