Image: reddit.com · Message like it's 1999. Stand up an AIM server on GCP!
An AIM server brought back for friends on a free cloud host
Deployment automation and email-verified signup built around an open-source OSCAR server, so classic AOL Instant Messenger clients can sign on again.
Credits
Earliest dated source:
The full story
AIM stopped working when AOL shut down its protocol in 2017. The poster stood up a public server at aim.aaddrick.com using mk6i's open-oscar-server, a modern reimplementation of that protocol, so classic AIM 5.1 (or Pidgin) can connect on port 5190.
The poster's own part, built with Claude, was the deployment automation and an email-verified signup: out of the box the server either hands out accounts with no password check or needs an admin to create each one by hand. The form shows a generated password once and never stores one. The post warns that OSCAR traffic is plaintext and its password hashing is weak.
How it was done
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Sources
From a short post by the maker, so the details are as they tell them.
- Reddit: Message like it's 1999. Stand up an AIM server on GCP!Reddit poster: aaddrickPosted
The maker's post on r/ClaudeAI.
If it disappears: archived copy of Reddit: Message like it's 1999. Stand up an AIM server on GCP! (opens in a new tab)
- The code: github.comRepository account: aaddrick
The project on GitHub.