AOL sold the service to Digital Sky Technologies back in 2010, and the Reg FOSS desk – once known to his friends as 73187508 – verified that old accounts still worked.
More ambitious is a project called NINA which is hoping to open a whole range of them: AOL, MSN, Yahoo!
Its MSN Messenger server, Escargot, opened up in 2021 – although by way of full disclosure, this vulture has so far failed to get any client to connect to it.
As we've said earlier, Pidgin is very much alive and can talk to Discord, Matrix, Mattermost, Rocket.chat, Slack, Telegram, and most other chat services.
In our cynical view, a communications service isn't really cross-platform unless it has a documented protocol and a choice of true, native clients.
A Javascript web app running in Electron doesn't count – which disqualifies Slack for a start.
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