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
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