What I truly miss is the short era, when it looked like Jabber is going to win the chat world. At least here in Europe, ICQ was on its way out. Both Google and Facebook had interoperable XMPP servers. It ended very shortly after that, but it was good for the year or two while it lasted.
I was just talking about this the other day... it was nearly a panacea of interconnected, interoperable messengers. My memory shortened it to a few months, but I remember it pretty well. The protocol sucked, but it did work.
I really miss the group chats on Yahoo that included voice. X spaces is close-ish, and I know that discord and others have similar features... just feels a lot less connected.
Since Champions Online, Cryptic Studio's game chat server used to be Jabber compatible, too. I don't know if it still is, I haven't had a Jabber client running in a while. It might still be.
There was something really cool about getting MMO Guild chat (or Fleet chat in my case as a big Star Trek Online player at the time) in your normal IM client.
That was also about when we discovered the server would let you create channels that would be global across all the games (and any IM clients). I still tend to refer to Champions Online and (Cryptic's) NeverWinter Online as "Holodeck Adventures" for that reason, because I'd commonly play those in the days of my very active STO Fleet until people started chatting about STO in the global fleet chat.
Facebook never had an interoperable server. They operated a limited functionality gateway to allow using your own client, but it never worked well and never federated.
Unfortunately, the dev refuses to opensource this and the Escargot rewrite. There's a FOSS AIM server[1], and apparently it supports ICQ, which is new from the last I saw it.
I have a lot of love and nostalgia for aim and AOL and think it would be a fun motivator to learn more programming with a project like that but not without sharing.
Yes, this is it. "Logging on" and "Logging off" were explicit actions that you took as part of your day, instead of just being perpetually connected and reachable.
What would be the purpose of launching a decaying lump of monkey meat into space when the AI can explore just as well with a tiny fraction of the mass requirements?
I'd wager that it will be AI's using IRC from space, but IPv6 still won't have replaced IPv4. :)
Cool project, kudos to the devs, even though (as other comments say) it seems rather pointless. Some things better stay in the past while you enjoy the nostalgia once in a honeymoon.
> We're working to primarily rebuild the original AIM (AOL Instant Messenger), AOL Desktop, Yahoo and ICQ platforms as close to the originals as possible, and document the entire thing.
Why not contribute to one of many FLOSS implementations that were once maintained?
What is the story for security/encryption to exist in a modern threat landscape? I expect with server-based systems you could have an encrypted tunnel to the server and just connect to a local proxy, or ??
Here you would try to reuse your old computer (usually 15-20 years old) for common tasks done in 2025. The web it's a no-no minus a few services but you would surprised. Hint: yt-dlp+mpv set to 480p and below, Retrozilla+ a TLS hack in about:config, fake User Agents (PSP, Opera Mini...), https://legacyupdate.net with a Gemini client and gemini://gemi.dev with the News Waffle proxy, RSS news delivered from Usenet with GMANE... there are tons of hacks.
Patching the old clients it's often usually easy, even more in case of AMSN (TCL). It's a matter of changing the URL of the service and maybe some slight API change.
Escargot covers the MSN services, which is similar to NINA:
Other side of the equation. Trillian was an unofficial client, this seems to be a group running a series of unofficial servers that can be used with the original clients, and presumably also contemporary unofficial clients.
I'm also aware of the P3OL project which supports AOL 2.x and 3.x clients.
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