ICQ

2 Articles

The OpenOscar Server in terminal, with Pidgin connected

AIM-ing For A More Open Platform Than Discord

July 14, 2026 by 30 Comments

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.

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ICQ Will Shut Down On June 26 This Year

May 26, 2024 by 29 Comments

In many ways, ICQ has always been a bit of a curiosity. It was one of the first major instant messenger clients of the 1990s. It saw broad uptake alongside the likes of AOL Instant Messenger and MSN Messenger. Yet, it outlasted both of them despite not being attached to an industrial juggernaut like AOL or Microsoft. After 27 years, however, it seems that the last petal will drop, with the shutdown of ICQ announced on the ICQ website for June 26, 2024.

Originally launched by an Israeli company, Mirabilis, in June of 1996, it took the Internet by storm, leading to AOL buying Mirabilis in June of 1998. Under the wing of AOL, ICQ kept growing its user base until it was sold to Digital Sky Technologies (now VK, which operates Mail.ru) in 2010. Around this time, the likes of Facebook and Google, with their own messaging solutions, came onto the scene, leaving ICQ to flounder. Ultimately, ICQ found a new home in the Russian market as a mobile messaging system until its imminent shutdown. Users are urged to move to the VK Messenger instead.

The demise of ICQ obviously led to a blast of nostalgia on sites like Hacker News, even though it has lost relevance in the West for many years. We’re sad to see this chapter end and will mourn the demise of our UINs (RIP, 61007952) along with our fellow compatriots in the usual IRC channels.

This is what happens when you depend on the grid. Going off the grid doesn’t have to look homemade, either.