Hello buddies, we've got big news!

It's chilly and cloudy here at the NINA & Escargot HQ in Kansas, which is a great day to stay in and bask in the wonders of AIM, now free and publicly available.

We support all versions of AIM, and all features are functional, however client-to-client features such as talk (voice chat), video, file transfers, direct connections (image sharing), etc won't be finalized until the next update. Additionally, some features in much later versions of AIM such as 7.5, 8.0 such as Lifestream and image sharing have not yet launched as we're still ironing out the details and they'll be coming soon, but overall these clients are functional.

We'll be releasing a server update soon with bug and feature fixes which have come up since the public launch.

This update has been a long time coming, thousands of hours of development, research, and testing and now AIM is ready for primetime. We made it publicly available in a soft launch late last week, however now it's time to get the word out and get more people chatting.

If you've got an Escargot account or just want to get on AIM right now, all you need to do is follow the instructions here.

I'm glad we could finally bring this to the community, which for me personally is the best Internet community I have ever been a part of. It's wonderful to see so many people enjoying our projects, contributing help to others, and just having laid back conversations with each other about whatever comes to mind. I also want to say that these have been the best developers I've ever had the pleasure of working with.

While AIM may be public, ICQ however is still in gamma as some features are still incomplete, there's still some development that needs to be done however it is available for anyone who donates (or has donated) at least $2 USD. Once ICQ is ready for primetime, then it too will be public, and we don't have an ETA on that since ICQ's protocol and scope of functionality is massive compared to AIM, but we are making progress.

We're also making progress on Escargot 2.0 and getting classic AOL support from the alpha phase to the beta phase. For those who paid $2 for early access to AIM you have been given access to PowerTools, which is basically our version of Discord Nitro, for now it only allows you to speak in the ⁠last-call chat directly from Discord, however in the near future it will open up additional features and access within AIM, ICQ, etc. Of course all gamma tier and higher donors also have PowerTools so if you've donated before, you're already in the butter zone, baby.

Now that AIM is freely available, running it is not free, so we still need your support. You can support us via: a one time or recurring donation, both of which come with rewards and Discord roles, learn more here.

If you can't donate, don't tell us, instead you can still help by telling others about us via tweets, toots, videos, or whatever else you can think of.