I guess I use AOL Instant Messenger again? Lmao ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Friday, June 7th, 2024, 12:11

Mood: Energetic

I was hoping to update on here about twice a week, but honestly now I'm happy to just go for the once. Maybe I will do two or three on weeks--like this upcoming one, where I'm off several days in a row!--where I have less work stuff to do and more time to work on my projects. At least for the purposes of updating this site, today is gonna be a big tech day, with mucho bugfixes.

Last week, mostly out of curiosity and boredom when I came home from work, I logged onto my laptop to see if I could download a functioning version of AOL Instant Messenger--lovingly called AIM by Gen Xers and Millennials alike--onto Windows 11. I was expecting nothing at best and a janky virus-laden hellscape of .exe files at worst, so imagine my surprise when I stumbled across this tutorial. Imagine my greater surprise when it actually fucking worked.

If you want to just get to the part where I teach you how to do this, scroll down to the next bolded text. I went on a little bit of a "Grandma sitting on the porch shaking her cane at the kids" tangent. Oopsie!

Why would anyone want this? Lest this post turn into a long thinkpiece about how we Millennials watched 9/11 on TV and then got our first jobs during the Great Recession, and so we're emotionally immature and need to use things that are from when we were kids, I'll segue this to a discussion about the anti-FAANG movement and criticisms of web 3.0 at large. Per a Statistia survey, as of May 2024, the top five messaging platforms used in the United States are all owned either by Meta, Google, or Apple. (This excludes plain ol' SMS texting, done almost always from an Apple or Google-based device.) The platforms we have available all, in some capacity, allow FAANG to profit off of our data.

But wait, can't we just use Discord? Yes, using Discord doesn't feed the beast quite as effectively as using one of the FAANG platforms does, but just because Discord users tend to be geekier and techier on average doesn't mean we can forget that Discord is still a big company. Discord still came under scrutiny during the January Congressional hearings on tech and child safety, for its lack of protections for minors on the platform. It's still a platform that makes money off of, potentially, child exploitation.

My big criticisms of web 3.0 boil down to two things. One, we have huge tech monopolies designed to siphon tons of money from us not just for (arguably) freely relinquishing our data, but also by putting minors in potentially unsafe situations. Were we Millennials better off "cybering" in Yahoo! chat rooms? Okay, no, but Yahoo! and AOL didn't own us like Meta does. The lobby by big tech to continue its campaign of total deregulation is leagues beyond what we saw in the '90s.

My second strike against web 3.0 is that it's aesthetically uniform. I think we've gotten a lot better about it in the 2020s--thank God we seem to be getting over the "BOOTSTRAP AND WORDPRESS FOR EVERYTHING!" phase--but it's still nothing compared to what it was in the '90s and 2000s. I have been dicking around on the Internet since I can remember. The haphazard Wild West of the turn of the millennium allowed for so much creativity and expression. I miss that. So much. It's a big reason why I wanted to continue using Neocities for this particular blog, even though the content really better translates to Instagram, TikTok, etc. We don't all need to be influencers. Maybe I just want to write blog entries and vibe.

ANYWAY. Now that that part's over, let's install AIM!

First, you'll need to register an account with the server that maintains this new AIM platform. Keep in mind old school web rules. You won't be able to use special characters in your username or password; just letters and numbers.

Then, you'll want to install a version of AIM from this list that works for your computer. The site recommends using 5.1, but I downloaded that and it made my computer crash whenever I fired it up. I ended up choosing 4.8 and that worked. You may need to play around a little bit and find a version that works seamlessly with your computer. Don't worry if it makes your computer crash at first; it's not a virus or sus. Just uninstall and reinstall with a new version until you find one that you can fire up.

Once you have found a version of the AIM file that works for your computer, what you'll need to do is follow these instructions to change the host server that the AIM client uses. This is the first and second steps of that FAQ. Once you have replaced the server in your AIM client with iwarg.ddns.net or phoenixim.ddns.net port:5190, you should be able to successfully log in and personalize your AIM client like you used to. (The below images are borrowed from the host's website.)

There are still buddy icon websites, like Buddy-Icons.info. (If you search "AIM buddy icons", you'll find more buddy icon sites, but I'm not linking them because of the prevalence of various slurs and jokes about SA and such on the icons. One thing we do have going for us in the 2020s is that's not cool anymore.) In the settings as well--the yellow wrench logo--you can set your font preferences and your away messages.

That's more or less it! If you decide to do this, let me know your AIM screenname and we can be on each other's buddy lists.