Link: https://veronicaexplains.net/open-oscar-server/

Tired of Discord? Want to chat with your friends using that perfectly good Windows 98 machine? Well now you can spin up your own AIM server.

did this the other day after watching Veronica's video. had myself and a few buddies on it. man it was a blast. Just hearing that notification sound again was awesome. Spent a good chunk just setting up away msgs and finding old profile icons.

Oh my god open ICQ?!

Oh nice!

You could do that, though unless you have a bunch of Windows 98 PCs you wish to use the official client software on, you may as well host an XMPP server instead. It’s open, actively being developed, and while the majority of people haven’t heard of it, this is also the case with AIM these days (at best, middle-aged people will have memories of using it when they were teenagers, and be surprised that it still sort of exists).

Do you still remember your own icq number?

No, not any more! I did for a long time but it’s gone, replaced by other numbers I needed more recently.

yep. seven digits long. my slashdot was 4 long.

I mean the number 14 is really important to remember

Ok 4 digit Slashdot is kinda impressive

naaa. i’m just old.

You're not that old if you know Slashdot. If you brought up gopher and playing muds I'd ask if your wheelchair is comfortable...

lol. i used gopher, kermit, zmodem and … sigh still play muds. when i can. no real good mobile clients these days.

Ok then it's official, you are old :-)

I followed Veronica down this rabbit hole. The server part was beautifully easy.

But sadly, there are no Linux AIM clients - pidgin dropped AIM support 8 years ago.

I compiled an 8 year old version of pidgin from source and it ran but seems hardcoded to point to AIM's official servers (which no longer exist).

Aww thats too bad. Loved pidgin back in the day!