Solved Identity and instant messaging: AIM, ICQ, Yahoo!, Skype, Google Talk

AJCxZ0

AJCxZ0

Having just signed up, I visited my new Account details page and was offered fields to fill in my "Identities":

AIM: Retired 16 Dec 2017 by AOL
ICQ: Retired 26 Jun 2024 in favour of VK Messenger
Yahoo! Messenger: Retired 18 Jul 2018 by Yahoo/Verizon.Oath/Yahoo as a favour to a squirrel
Skype: Retired by Microsoft on 5 May 2025 in favour of Teams
Google Talk: Retired by Google on 16 Jun 2022 in favour of Hangouts
Facebook: Not retired yet
Twitter: Renamed to X on 17 May 2024, but not retired yet

While these instant messenger platforms no longer exist in their original form, some modern or current equivalents where an individual identity can be provided include (but are not limited to)

Discord
Google Chat (or Meet or whatever Google rebranded or replaced this week).
IRC
Matrix
Microsoft Teams
Signal (which has supported usernames since 20 Feb 2024)
Snapchat
Telegram Messenger
Viber
WeChat
WhatsApp
XMPP (Jabber)

Since social media platforms are included, add

Bluesky
Lemmy
Loops
Mastodon
Mbin
Peertube
Pixelfed
Pleroma

For the record, I was

AIM: AJCxZ0
ICQ: AJCxZ0/283813972
Yahoo! Messenger: AJ_Z0
Skype: Never
Google Talk: AJCxZ0
Facebook: Never
Twitter: Never
 
Wow! I didn't realize that ICQ was only retired in 2024. My wife and I used to use it a lot in the early 2000s, but somehow moved away from it. I thought it was retired long ago.
 
Welcome to the FreeBSD forums. 🖐️ You know, should you have filled out any contact details, they are pretty worthless if nobody can view your profile. As a privacy‐by‐default setting nobody can view your profile (except admins/mods and you yourself). Edit the privacy settings.​
 
Nobody needs all those platforms. It's questionable why any are needed at all.

EDIT: Looking through them, I see only three I have signed up for in the past. IRC of course. Twitter/X but I don't recall doing it or why and rarely visit. Facebook just maybe five years ago because I met some relatives who said they were on there and encouraged me to sign up. (They no longer go there now so neither do I.)
 
Well, at my first IT job, around 2000, we used AIM. And some co-workers and I used after hours, my nieces used it, so I'd use it to talk to them, etc. ICQ I had but seldom used. IRC of course. None of the others. My wife uses some for her business, facebook, though she has mainly replaced that with Instagram, I dunno if she uses what used to be twitter, I don't think she uses anything else. Slack for work. Discord and the others I've managed to avoid. Oh, and once in a great while, reddit. Mostly for obscure stuff, like I vaguely remember a Japanese film but couldn't find it and there's a subreddit for it, and I got an answer quickly. On rare occasions, I've found something useful there, but of course, it's hard wading through the non-useful
 
ICQ was good in 1999-2002. Later (2008+) they created new ugly client and probably changed the protocol (old clients stopped working). The main disadvantage was that original protocol was not encrypted.
 
Kai Burghardt said:
nobody can view your profile
Click to expand...
Thank you for catching that. I was sure that I set it to Members only, but clearly I did not.
MG said:
So, who's the supervisor? Matrix? I don't like these assimilation tactics at all.
Click to expand...
Since I'm off to a slow start, please excuse my cluelessness and explain your question and to what you refer as "assimilation tactics".
scottro said:
at my first IT job, around 2000, we used AIM.
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While not my first IT job, I too started using AIM at my job... at AOL.
drhowarddrfine said:
Nobody needs all those platforms. It's questionable why any are needed at all.
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True, but sometimes you want to communicate with someone outside the confines of one platform, such as these forums. From all the linked logos at the bottom of the page, even the forum itself wants you to share and enjoy.
 
  • Thanks
Reactions: MG
Since I'm off to a slow start, please excuse my cluelessness and explain your question and to what you refer as "assimilation tactics".
Click to expand...
Well, you're kind of promoting ICQ, but it doesn't exist anymore, so I was wondering which other central entity has taken over the protocol to also be ICQ. You're not mentioning a service name...

Pidgin was a universal frontend for early IM services. Matrix owns third-party IM communication and subjects them to their own centralized identification system and pretends nothing changed..
 
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