Retro Net Goes Deeper Than You Think

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Queue Inception bwam sound. If you’ve been following my little journey in hollowing out a piece of the internet that isn’t annoying, dominated by corporations, and their engagement tricks, you’ve likely seen me popping up this website, erecting a phpBB forum, and you’ve probably also noticed that people all over the place are making GeoCities-ish type websites for fun! Well, the revival of the old-net goes even deeper than that.

Ever since Meta turned on Facebook, things have gotten worse, and worse. MySpace got sold off and changed into something completely different (a janky website for bands???). AOL Instant Messenger went offline, for good. Twitter plopped into the ether, Tumblr became a replacement for LiveJournal, and then for a decade everyone only visited four websites.

That was … until people got tired of the algorithms, and the disingenuous content of people and corps who use social media to pump stats and shun actual social interaction.

Out came Mastodon on the ActivityPub network, and, although ActivityPub existed for a long time before Mastodon’s rise, I feel like this is exactly where people started rebuilding, for real.

You see, the internet is a lot like space. You can build a wall. You can put up a ton of interstellar checkpoints that flash a million ads in your face as you navigate around each system. But, as soon as people realize that space is not a two dimensional plane, and that they can just, fly in a different direction, things start to change.

AOL Instant Messenger, reborn!

Exactly a year ago today, the Retro AIM Server repo appeared on Github. A project that effectively open sourced the AOL Instant Messenger servers. In that, you, or anyone, can just host a server that people can use the actual old software to connect to.

But you don’t need to do all of that.

All you need to do is use the links in the repo to download AIM to your system of choice. I’m on Linux, so I had to use Wine to open it. No biggie.

Then, you need a server, right?

I gotchu.

All you’ve got to do is go here, and create an account. Then, in the AIM section, create your username and password.

You’re done!

Open the original AIM client, follow the instructions from the repo that tell you where to put your connection info, and sign on!

You’re back, or, if you were born in the 2000s, you’re here for the first time!

The only issue, is this is not something that’s on a billion person network. So … having buddies will not be something you … have, right away. But, that’s okay, because you can have me as your first buddy. My AIM name is Atomleiche.

Just click the “+/- setup” button on the bottom right, then click “add buddy” and type in my username. Then confirm it. If I’m online, you’ll hear the sound of a door opening, and then you can just double-click me and send a message!

It’s that simple!

And this is how it worked back on the old-net. You added buddies, and then when they came online, it was time chat. Or not! Some people would just add me back in the day to expand their list, I think. Who knows. But I had a whole lot of buddies, who I’m sure have completely different lives now. Maybe none of them think about this stuff anymore. Maybe they do!

I don’t know.

But, I feel like this is still only the beginning.