Do you remember AIM? It may suprize you to hear that AOL’s instant messanger was actually supported all the way up to 2017– two years after Discord launched. Unlike Discord, AIM is a protocol, not a platform. Everything on your favourite Discord server is at the mercy of the corporate masters of said server; you can’t just spool up your own. Not so for AIM, as [Veronica] explains, both on her blog and in a YouTube video that we’ve embedded below.
The key is the fact that the AIM protocol isn’t locked into AOL’s now-defunct servers; it was reverse engineered in its prime for open-source messengers like Pidgin. You can host your own server, too, using the OpenOscarServer by [mk6i]. Even better, it’s not just AIM, but ICQ! In the sort of irony you only get in real life, the OpenOscar community does all its support on a Discord server. But then, they couldn’t hardly do it over AIM or ICQ these days.
For those of you who were too old or too young to get sucked into the 90s instant messenger craze, these protocols don’t just create chat rooms, that would be the even older Internet Relay Chat protocol, but usually worked more like SMS text messages. You have a contact list, and you send messages to your contacts via a server that acts as a hub. Once upon a time, that server was AOL’s, but now thanks to the OpenOscar project, it can be anybody’s computer. Of course, like texting, you can rope all of your contacts into one big group chat, and the protocol does support images and VOIP. (Which is starting to sound a lot like Discord.)
If you’re tired of your friend-group being at the mercy of American tech companies, [Veronica]’s blog post serves as a good guide to get you started running OpenOscarServer on a Linux system; she used a virtual private server but figures a Raspberry Pi ought to have enough grunt if you don’t have a huge number of people signed up.
For completeness, we should mention that while AOL pulled the plug on AIM nearly a decade back, ICQ, the other protocol supported by OpenOscarServer, lasted straight through until 2024.
Thanks to Keith Olson for the tip! Our tipsline is based on decentralized “electronic mail” technology that anyone can access.
It’s sad and hard to understand for me how we moved wit instant messaging from open protocols like IRC or XMPP or even closed but possible to implement like AIM which you can use from any client you like to closed systems like Messanger, WhatsApp, Teams etc with bloated web UIs or spying apps and no alternative clients. Even Google Talk in the early “don’t be evil” days started as XMPP. Now there are modern alternatives like Matrix protocol but it doesn’t have traction and people and companies seem to don’t care about being fully dependent on and compromised by Meta or MS
Having operated a few matrix instances, the number one reason that it isn’t getting any traction is that it is an utter pain in the butt to get set up. Discord, others you just download and go – but, as it is for essentially all federated software, matrix is config hell for the server and far, far less than intuitive for the end user.
Open source customers usually being geeks who love challenges in their lives.
Not enough pain yet. No worries, enshittification will take care of that with time.
Telegram servers are closed but clients are open. You can connect whatever client you want to it. I vibecoded my own python client in 2 minutes because I wanted a super simple cli version for inside wsl and it works great. Family, friends, colleagues, all moved to Telegram.
some of my irc friends use discord now because they like the ease of posting photos.
i have had some luck getting lay people to use XMPP (with ejabberd). i don’t even know if they could send photos through it but i’m guessing not
Unforunately, the fancy flashiness and cutesy-annoying feature creep (stickers!) of the walled-garden offerings have largely lured people away from open protocols. I miss the simplicity of text only. Although it’s nice being able to post pictures and videos I admit.
I feel like many open source tools are so open they lead to increased gossip and privacy invasion, but this time for people closer to you, because they show more data than necessary like last signed in times.
There is no button to turn off read notifications on self hosting.
Yes maybe I had some terrible friends along the way too. But I don’t need anyone to know I sign on chat or voice for 3secs and then leave.
So I am not sure who’s worse about having my data.
This isn’t really inherent to open source tools though, that’s just a feature set that’s absent.
To one extent it is inherent to open source DIY hosted tools – as whomever is hosting it for you will always be able to know everything as the service logs are readable to the folks with that admin access (maybe not the content of the messages as this particular self host service could be just the postman for End to End encrypted messaging, but certainly that messages were sent and when folks last interacted with the server). Where with the other services its whichever spyware company is running it.
Though read notification type stuff is actually more likely to be configurable in the open source than the closed – really easy feature to add if your client/server doesn’t already come with it, where the closed source tool you are at their mercy entirely.
The real question is why does Hans care so much though. At worst it informs them you sent that one important message while busy with that short log in, or have seen a message exists but haven’t had the time to deal with it etc… Really nothing particularly meaningful, especially now its oh so likely you are accessing it from a mobile device that could be anywhere on the planet with a cellular/wifi signal..
As I said, bad friends. But oh boy they do like self hosting for exactly this reason. Technology can’t solve some social problems unfortunately.
FORUMS! Give me my fking forums back! I need an ENTER KEY that does a normal line break instead of posting the text already in the box! WTF even is that? What is all the animated-GIF cat vomit smeared over every… post? comment?
Discord is a phone app that sometimes with great difficulty allows itself to be opened in a web browser. Absolute trash. Discord has contributed to FORUMS turning into spooky abandoned graveyards where you have to pay to save an attachment (yeah, lookin’ right at you Badcaps, I sure am).
so much this. forums are better structured. they offer the lostech benefit of being able to go back where you left off. incidentally this is also why i hate facebook.
Discord works on a mobile phone? I’ve only ever used it via a web browser… Never faced any issues.
Granted, I have only ever been on one whatever, server, community, I don’t know. So I don’t know if all of them are like this, but this one had categories (they probably have their own proprietary name for it but I just do not care), and you clicked one category and it opened a list in another column, then click a topic and it opens a THIRD column. All three columns present in the window all at the same time. Infinite scroll and everything. It’s a phone app. It works like a phone app. Right-click context menus are not allowed, because it’s a phone app. Browser extensions don’t work on the site because it’s a phone app.
No need for messaging apps when you don’t have any friends ( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°)
Once again, the real hack is in the comments!
i gave up friends when the last of my instant messenger accounts in pidgin stopped working. hardly miss them at all. though i still use quite a few forums.
thing is, discord is very featureful, has tons of users, and has tons of communities. aside from the ads and spam (which can be dealt with using custom or modded client), it’s honestly really good.
except they can rug pull at any time.
imo xmpp is shit.
if you just want to chat with your friends, i think self-hosted mattermost (kind of an open source slack) is pretty good. but its voice and screen sharing features (if it even has those) are nowhere near discord’s.
i wonder how matrix compares. never used it.
what’s wrong with XMPP? i barely use it and it’s alright for me but i wonder what limits its larger use
I was working at AOL the day they announced it :-) Which reminds me, I need to schedule that prostrate exam.
They usually have me stand . . .
We are regressing. We had blogs, and forums and wiki. And now we have . . . Ugh, Discord. A black hole where human innovation and collaboration go to die.
Internet became incredibly useful and democratic, but then monetization slammed on the brakes!
Don’t forget Discourse too. Another closed platform that doesn’t get indexed outside of the platform.
https://meta.discourse.org/t/how-public-discourse-sites-are-indexed-by-search-engines-like-google/1184?tl=en
As a person of a certain age I think this is cool for nostalgia reasons.
But I find all this talk of AIM as being open because it’s a protocol to be weird and jarring.
Yah, it’s been reverse engineered and so you CAN code for it. I get that. I also remember back in the day trying to stick with a Linux desktop and still communicate with my friends. AOL offered a second protocol, TOC for third party messengers. You could install and use a messenger client that spoke TOC today and be confident it would still work tomorrow. But it only offered the most basic services. I don’t remember the limitations I just remember it being a disappointment. Then came the clients that reverse engineered OSCAR itself. They were more featured, cool. But AOL did not like this and would frequently update their protocol just to break them. It was a cat and mouse game for a while. I used to keep two clients, one that used OSCAR and the other for when that one wasn’t working to use TOC.
I used to get pretty frustrated about how closed AOL was regarding OSCAR.
And this was just the Instant Messenger. I remember it being a big competition between the corporate walled garden view of the Internet that AOL itself offered and the free and open Internet one could get from just about any other ISP. Openness was NOT something I would have used to describe AOL back in the day when they were big! I never guessed the open internet would win only for people to chose social media silos. So sad!
Anyway, despite my antipathy towards AOL’s walled garden back in the day… like I said.. I’m a certain age now so… nostalgia.
Something I have searched for is an open source, reverse-engineered server so that the old AOL client itself could be revived. That would be fun to give to all my old friends and pretend it’s our college days again.
It turns out there have been a couple of projects to do this.
Whoever owns AOL now… they had them both shut down!
I wonder how long this open OSCAR server can avoid their notice.
AOL doesn’t care as long as you aren’t using things AOL still owns
I don’t understand what you are trying to say here.
Are you saying they no longer own the OSCAR protocol? If not.. how did that happen?!?
Or are you implying something more physical, like the people implementing a replacement server for the old AOL client were somehow using AOL’s servers? They were not. Those have been shut down for years now. They were implementing their own. And AOL did shut them down.
No one here uses anonymous imageboards?