Here's how I host my own AIM server
25 points by FedericoSchonborn
25 points by FedericoSchonborn
Fun read, but whoever reads this and thinks "we didn't have a ton of different messengers back then" you'd be mistaken.
I talked to lots of people who spent ages on AIM or MSN and I have used neither, ever - because I, and everyone at my school, was on ICQ, then IRC and the split wasn't really better than these days.
Wasn’t there a big geographical split? AIM in the US, ICQ in EU?
My friends in the US were pretty evenly split between AIM and ICQ, with a few on MSN also. It seemed to vary based on school/office. I had enough on each that I tended to use multi-protocol clients.
I was mostly on AIM, in Europe. But then again I mostly moved in the US-centric sphere on the web, and only discovered later that the internet had Europeans on it as well.
Can't speak for EU or US, only my corner of Australia, in 00, 01, 02 everyone I went to school with was on MSN. Few had ever heard of alternatives.
AIM, yeah, but the girl I was quasi-dating at the time used MSN, which was a strong motivator. :)
See also the video on the subject, I was about to post it but I didn't know whether I should have kept the bait-ish title or use the one provided by DeArrow.
I didn’t find the title on the video to be bait, exactly… but most of the time I’d rather see a blog post than a video, anyway.
A supplemental video does sort of constitute a nice sense of proof of effort now that blog posts are just a prompt away.
Fun! The question I was hoping this article would answer is, "...and then what?" It doesn't federate with other servers, does it? So I guess everyone you want to message would have to be on the same server? Or do you just talk to yourself?
What's the problem with being on multiple servers?
That's basically the model that discord pretends it has.
You have a single account and login with Discord though. Nobody wants to create and manage an account and login to an unbounded number of servers.
Sounds like a feature to me. Completely solves the issue of a single corporate entity being the gatekeeper to every discord server.
A Discord "server" is a single group/community space, though. It's more like visiting a forum, with a menu of topics and categories hosting ongoing discussions. As I understand it, AIM is organized more around 1-on-1 conversations, isn't it? You don't have to switch over to someone else's Discord server to DM them or check for new messages from them.
AIM has group chats too. Basically the later stage of AIM you'd usually run a AIM/Jabber client that connected to a bunch of servers.
Didn't miss the opportunity to start the post with the proper screenshot! As it should be.
The pragmatism and usefulness of software back then we're so refined.
This was a fun blog post! While I don't have interest in AIM itself, i do love that folks are playing with old stuff again! And, now browsing the author's other blog posts, i see i'm going to go down other rabbit holes with their other posts...which isn't a bad thing i suppose! :-)