AIM-ing For a More Open Platform Than Discord

Remember AOL's AIM instant messenger? It actually survived until 2017. Unlike Discord, where everything is centralized on corporate servers, AIM was built as an open protocol, so anyone can run their own server. Hackaday covers the OpenOscarServer project, which reverse-engineered AIM and ICQ. With OpenOscarServer, you can self-host the whole system on Linux, a VPS, or even a Raspberry Pi. You get group chats, images, and VOIP—like Discord, but decentralized. The irony: the OpenOscar community coordinates all its work through a Discord server.

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