this post was submitted on 28 Feb 2025
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Around these parts in the 2000s, MSN Messenger was what literally everyone used. Then Microsoft bought Skype and decided to shut down MSN Messenger. Then they also ruined Skype. Microsoft just can't do anything right despite making so much money. It's like they have no long term vision.
I would say this heavily depends on the region. In Germany, I knew nobody who used MSN, everyone only used ICQ.
That's why I said around these parts. Back then there was a lot more regional fragmentation.
Around my region, South America, everybody used MSN as well. We went through a phase of using Skype, but it was too resource heavy in comparison with MSN. Later on, people who needed voice chat for games played around with several different apps, until we finally settled with Discord back in 2016. Say all you want about Discord, but I've been using it for almost a decade at this point, and if your need is to have voice and text chat and easy screen sharing for gaming, it's basically the golden standard. The problem started when people started using it as a replacement for forums.
Man, I miss icq...
God it's like Gavin Fucking Belson at Hooli is running shit
Where I live, everyone used AOL Instant Messenger, or AIM for short. It was popular with teens because it offered chat rooms, but that meant it was also a popular hunting ground for predators. Nearly every terminally online teen from the late 90’s and early 2000’s has a story about getting groomed on AIM, by someone they initially thought was their own age.
Then Google Chat and Facebook Messenger came along, (and AOL’s subscriber count began to dwindle as people moved to broadband internet) and it was almost completely dead by 2010.