the sad thing about this is what made it magical before was the people that were on there, and it’s impossible to get that back now!

Cool project, kudos to the devs, even though (as other comments say) it seems rather pointless. Some things better stay in the past while you enjoy the nostalgia once in a honeymoon.

so basically Trillian?

What a way to make me feel old. Nice project. :)

What I truly miss is the short era, when it looked like Jabber is going to win the chat world. At least here in Europe, ICQ was on its way out. Both Google and Facebook had interoperable XMPP servers. It ended very shortly after that, but it was good for the year or two while it lasted.

Are Pidgin/MrandNG supported?

I saw that referenced from an OCC challenger:

https://occ.deadnet.se

Here you would try to reuse your old computer (usually 15-20 years old) for common tasks done in 2025. The web it's a no-no minus a few services but you would surprised. Hint: yt-dlp+mpv set to 480p and below, Retrozilla+ a TLS hack in about:config, fake User Agents (PSP, Opera Mini...), https://legacyupdate.net with a Gemini client and gemini://gemi.dev with the News Waffle proxy, RSS news delivered from Usenet with GMANE... there are tons of hacks.

Patching the old clients it's often usually easy, even more in case of AMSN (TCL). It's a matter of changing the URL of the service and maybe some slight API change.

Escargot covers the MSN services, which is similar to NINA:

https://escargot.chat/

I loved the original AIM. I remember using it from roughly 1999 to when it was finally deprecated in 2017. Almost 20 years!

Create the Internet you want to see.

Ah nostalgia. My text message alert (when my phone is not on silent) is the "incoming IM" sound from AIM.

What is the story for security/encryption to exist in a modern threat landscape? I expect with server-based systems you could have an encrypted tunnel to the server and just connect to a local proxy, or ??