Life & fun · alternatives · 2026
24 alternatives to I recreated AOL Instant Messenger in the browser
What's under the hood: - Real-time messaging powered by Firebase - Buddy lists, groups & online presence - Away messages with auto-reply (and the classic %n, %d, %t variables) - Buddy icons & editable profiles - Group chat rooms - The actual AIM sounds - Full Windows 98 desktop UI — taskbar, desktop icons, start menu, the works. If you have any suggestions or feedback I would greatly appreciate hearing it. There's still more work to be done with it, but it's been a labor of love. Right now every user that logs on is automatically put on to your Buddy list. I thought this would be a great way…
Below are 24 products that do a similar job, ranked by how close each is in meaning and then by launch-day votes.
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Amber▲133Hi HN! Excited to share early access to Amber. I’ve tried every all-in-one messenger out there (Beeper included) but they always fell short. No real folders, no AI, clunky UI, no CRM features… As a founder who speaks with hundreds of people every quarter, I needed something better. So I decided to rebuild the entire experience from ground up. Thoughts from one of our users: "The app I've been searching for for a looong time." Check it out for free today! Demo: https://www.loom.com/share/8b5bc80b9893436b9190ae41fc3f0f50 Features: - All messages (Whatsapp, Telegram,…
2025 · useamber.app · its alternatives →
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The Social App▲173Launch a paid E2EE subscription group chat within seconds
2022 · its alternatives →
- 7FI
This is something fun I’ve been hacking on recently: ridiculously simple group chat. Go to http://faces.io and then get your friends to do the same. That’s it! :-D Currently works best in Chrome. It’s definitely beta status at best. Audio can get weird—be ready to mute. ;-) Let me know what you think!
2014 · its alternatives →
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I needed a couple of AOL Instant Messenger buddy icons for a project, and then that turned into a project and before you know it I was trying to scrape every single buddy icon off the internet. I have slightly over 500,000 of them live, browseable, and downloadable with a single click on my new totally non-commercial project site buddyiconarchive.com I think that I am perhaps 20% of the way to my goal of having a "complete" collection of all the buddy icons that ever appeared on the internet, a rough estimate based on the counts advertised by various period aggregators. I am looking to trade…
Aug 2026 · buddyiconarchive.com · its alternatives →
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Chat'Inn▲69Miminal, Clean and Realtime Global Chat Application
2022 · chat-inn.vercel.app · its alternatives →
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I hope you are doing better today than yesterday. (TLDR in the comments; or enjoy my story :) ) Why: About 11 months ago, I launched my app for the first time on Reddit's r/lonely because I had previously experienced loneliness myself during grad school. I wanted to reach out to people going through similar experiences by providing them with what would’ve helped me in the past. I felt this was an important mission for me and a much more rewarding one than my day job that I quit my job to work on the app full-time. It was necessary because I did not come from a programming background. I…
2024 · main.d1lmgoealm7rq0.amplifyapp.com · its alternatives →
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Instant messaging chat, with multiple social accounts
2019 · apps.apple.com · its alternatives →
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I built AIMless, a ridiculously minimalistic, browser native chat app that fits entirely into one HTML file (10 KB). It’s decentralized, P2P, and has no build tools, no server, and no frameworks. Just you, your browser, and a copy/pasted blob or two.
2025 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 17TW
2015 · chezapps.com · its alternatives →
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Self-hostable instant messaging server compatible with classic AIM and ICQ clients written in golang. (Independently developed, not affiliated with or endorsed by AOL) - mk6i/open-oscar-server
2024 · github.com · its alternatives →
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Hi everyone! I’m Arvid, cofounder of Anysphere (https://anysphere.co). With my two friends Sualeh and Shengtong I have been spending the last few months building a dedicated home for important, long-form conversations. We’re super excited to let the HN community test it out! We think that no existing platform for point–to-point communication prioritizes the conversations that you actually care about and that really matter. Instant messaging is filled with careless texts and stickers, email is filled with receipts and spammers, and physical mail, while better in those respects, is…
2022 · gist.github.com · its alternatives →
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Hi HN, For years I’ve missed the feeling of an always-on chatroom without the silos and social overhead of Discord. So I built Together: a single-room, no-signup group chat that you join with one click. No channels, no rules (yet), no onboarding flow. Everyone lands in the same place and can start talking in under a second. Why I made it - Forums and blog comments are great but slow; Discord/Slack feel heavy for casual drop-ins if you aren’t already a member of a community. - I wanted the simplest possible space where ~100 people could idle, share shower thoughts, and keep the…
2025 · together.lol · its alternatives →
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A serverless chat backend - built on Firebase Cloud Functions - abiglobalhealth/chatfireServerless
2018 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 23IM
2016 · round.io · its alternatives →
- 24IM
www.heydonuts.com Android: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.heydonuts.dasmobile IOS: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/hey-donuts/id1453300843
2019 · its alternatives →
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Ranked by how close each launch is in meaning, then by votes. Prices were read from each product’s own site when checked and can change. Refine with your own description →