They put up with (if not were outright amused at) me digging up the weirdest 3rd party clients I could [1] and just kicking them around against the server software to find bugs [2]
[1] https://wiki.cursedsilicon.net/wiki/AIM_Clients
[2] https://github.com/mk6i/open-oscar-server/issues/120
somehow that experience eclipsed microsoft teams. i suppose thats unsurprising
It is fully backed by OOS
:)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49224443
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49167258
OK, OK... to be fair "discussed" is an over statement. Let's say "ICQ was mentioned here less than a month ago. :-)
UIN: 279866
It was acquired by AOL in 1998, went through several rounds of enshittification and protocol changes to defeat third party clients which did not show ads, and finally landed in Mail.Ru group in 2010. In about 2-3 years no one cared about ICQ anymore. Then, it slowly died.
I registered my account in 1998 (got a 7-digit number starting with 9) and the whole thing felt like a miracle back then. My first employer in 2003 used ICQ as a corporate messenger similar to how we now use Slack. Since I mostly used Linux back then, I was very happy to find centericq, then centerim, then finch. One of my first contributions to an open source project was a small patch to centericq, something about contacts panel resize if I remember correctly.
I believe the last time I actually launched any ICQ client was around 2012, and never since then.
The future is now!
My ICQ UIN was one of the few online accounts that I completely lost control of. Some "Russian hacker" took it over, by guessing the password, credential stuffing, or some other method, and I noticed that my profile had been usurped into a Cyrillic one. And that was long, long before 2010.