Correct! I’ve tried it with old iOS and it works.
Hello everyone,
at first, I want to thank the Escargot team / devs for chiming in here and clearing some things up. This is very helpful at this point in time, especially after the news section on the Escargot website went mostly quiet again (which I understand, of course).
Now to the stuff I want to contribute to this conversation:
First, I agree with a lot of stuff in this response. I’ve donated to Escargot myself multiple times and I did that mostly just to support the project after joining Escargot itself almost exactly 2 years ago and the Discord in January of 2024, which is now sadly gone. I’ve never used the pay-to-use services once. I donated because I liked the aim and direction of the project and the team and felt like supporting the effort, especially the cost area, would be really good. Because I thought (and mostly still think) that this project is unique in it’s own way and that you have to support stuff like this. The donation benefits were just a side thing for me, mostly. Doing RE and all the developing takes a lot of time and effort, especially when doing it along with a personal life (at least that’s what I understand), and it just seems like so much work. I definitely support the team making money with all this, even though the sharing now seems to have been a bit…let’s say in need of improvement. I, still to this day, do not regret donating (if Escargot stays up and we’ll get some new features soon (which takes time) of course.). Shortly before the server went down, I was involved in some drama (maybe to strong of a word for this, I don’t fully remember it with the Discrod server being gone), where I expressed slight concern that the development of new features (I’ll take Live Spaces and calls as an example again) was being really slow to the outside POV and that it could’ve stalled, and I believe @epicness and @Animadoria got it out of the way very soon after that. I’ll say it again: I know stuff like this takes time to do, but if would be cool to see some results soon. Or have some sort of regular updates, the e-mail list mentioned in the last announcement sounded really good.
And personally I never felt like anyone was greedy here. No one was really forced to pay money (if they only wanted to use WLM; and even if they wanted to use one of the other services), and the prices were, in my opinion, set quite fair. @ tonyshowoff (I can only actually mention two people as a new user / account on here) stated in every donation message / call to action that I can remember, that no one should donate money if they don’t have anything left over with which they would like to support the project. Of course, as it’s now been discussed quite often, people made mistakes here. That is a fact.
I’m just really sad that Escargot, as it was this whole time, is gone. Especially the Discord. Don’t get me wrong, the MSN service itself is the most important part of the project, and I really quite dislike Discord, but the place where I was able to chat with so many like-minded people, is gone. The thing for me is, that there is not really a similar alternative to the Discord server (yet). Skype has since moved over to CrossTalk, also for reasons that have been discussed a lot, which I understand, but still find kinda sad. @epicness stated very clearly (I think multiple times even, correct me if I’m wrong.) that CrossTalk is and never will be (completely) like Escargot and / or NINA. That is the “problem” for me. If I want to use Skype, I will have to use CrossTalk. If I want to chat with a lot of peole I know, I would have to use CrossTalk. If I want to have my Escargot Today and eventually hopefully Live Spaces and calls, I will have to use Escargot. If I want to chat with other people I know, I will have to use Escargot. I would need various seperate clients and accounts. Everything is just kind of a mess right now that no one can really fix.
I was really excited for Skype, and I still am, but the fact, that a lot of people have since moved away from Escargot and over to CrossTalk, and the Discord server being gone… I don’t even know what to say here. I’m kinda lost in all this and don’t really know what to do here. I wanna switch sort of and don’t want / can’t at the same time.
(Side note: Something that just crossed my mind: What happened to Napster? It isn’t really that important for me, just something I noticed.)
(Also, Escargot and CrossTalk are both very cool and good projects, and I wish they would just be one giant thing with all the features (which of course, will probably never happen, but I wanted to get it out there anyways.).)
Also, something that is very difficult for me right now, is that I really don’t know what is going on. Before you had almost like daily updates, because someone from the team would chime in and say something about the current situation, even if it were just a few words that stated “this and that is being worked on right now”. You could be directely in contact with the staff nearly every day. The last news post from the Escargot website is now at least 15 days old, I believe. And now the important part:
I understand this completely, and I don’t wanna offend anyone with this message. This is my opionion and “beliefs”, so to say, and I’m glad to get all of this out there where I can stay in contact with the people behind this, and everyone else.
This post / message / reply is probably really chaotic and gotten way longer than I expected, I hope it’s still somewhat understandable. 
(Hopefully I didn’t forget anything, happened quite often recently! :/)
Good to have that out there and be able to chat with people behind the services again, and maybe some people that I’m currently missing (out on) by not being on CrossTalk.
Let’s see where all of this goes.
Thanks, to everyone!
P.S.: @Animadoria Are you still on the Escargot team (and maybe developing), or did you switch over / leave entirely? That’s also something I don’t fully understand yet.
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Contrary to popular belief, no one should be attempting to revive the previously most popular piracy service. It’s an abuse vector.
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I don’t know, trying to lure one of your developers into a ponzi scheme and lying about super high costs to rake in extra money, among other things seems pretty greedy to me.
If you wanted to use AIM/ICQ for the longest time (and for a little while after the server spamming happened, since access was removed from everyone without the donator flag), and if you wanted to use AOL, yes you do. You have to donate to access it, ergo you’re forced to pay money.
If you want a proxy to be able to use AIM’s direct connection features without port forwarding, you’re forced to pay money. I would be forced to pay money to simply use file transfers on AIM, since my network is set-up as a CGNAT, which makes it so I can’t port forward. There’s nothing I can do about that other than… switching ISPs, I guess, which is infeasible. I get bandwidth can get expensive, but c’mon man.
You can have your opinion, but in mine, the fair price is $0. Monetizing intellectual properties you do not own is not a very good idea, evidently.
I should also add that I’m not at all against the idea of projects allowing donations, or even allowing beta-testing for donators. These types of services can get so expensive to run that it can be a genuine issue if you aren’t in a great spot financially.
My issue is entirely pay-walling clients you do not own, that you do not have the IP rights to, while collecting much more money than needed/acting like you’re in a state of desperation to get that extra money when you aren’t, and not providing any transparency or outright lying about where the extra money is actually going.
To name a good example, I think P3OL (another AOL revival project) has the right approach to donations.
Everything you’ve mentioned is planned to be implemented as a part of CrossTalk in some way as well (except maybe Live Spaces, but we do plan on implementing a social aspect that’s not too unlike it). Matter of fact I’ve been poking around with Spotlife (which is the third party service MSN 6.x - 8.x uses for NAT tunneling for calls) lately but I can’t say much more than that as I haven’t made much progress yet. It’s something I just started messing with last week, lol.
And Skype will have them when it’s done, because really what’s Skype without calls? The way Skype (at least, the versions we’re targeting) handles calls is actually not dissimilar to later versions of WLM, so work on that would benefit both.
And as far as current feature-sets, in terms of MSN and Yahoo! at least, CrossTalk has more features than Escargot/NINA. We’re only behind on AIM/ICQ, and even then that’s one of our top priorities, getting that up to scratch.
Nothing’s stopping you from getting them over to CrossTalk. The community we’ve built is already beautiful and it’d be awesome if we had more people here.
Don’t quote me on this but I would assume it has been shelved. They’re clearly in enough legal rut as it is, they don’t need to get the RIAA after them as well. That’s like poking a grizzly bear with rabies while you’re walking with crutches.
I think OP explained it pretty well 
.
I was aware about a lot of this information for quite some time but I wanted to hold off on making any public comments about it. Well, until now I guess :P.
I mean, hey that’s partially what inspired CrossTalk in the first place. I was dissatisfied with the overall direction Escargot/NINA was headed in, so CrossTalk was my answer to that (not to mention, developing IM servers is fun, until it isn’t :P). It’s somewhat of a continuation of the goal of Escargot pre-NINA merge. Just without the management problems of either era (because yeah as bad as Escargot/NINA’s current management is, we can’t really ignore that the old management wasn’t much better).
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And I guess the RIAA too Lawl
As someone who joined in the times where Valtron was still active and Escargot was something else entirely… It’s a huge pity.
Brother. I remember you from all the way back to ~2019. I’ll just subscribe to your words.
This will be the last time I’ll say something about this.
This was done for many reasons, the main two being:
- A way for users to support the server; the development
- Easier debugging and testing - having everyone is hard for us to see how the server holds up, where’s the bug; any large bugs; etc. Opening the flood gates little by little.
“and for a little while after the server spamming happened, since access was removed from everyone without the donator flag”
Yes, because someone spammed the forums; and the service; on purpose, with my dox, slurs, attacking me personally with my cats death, and so on. And I know who did it, but I think you don’t want me to say who it was. It was for protecting all the users and the service, and it was a temporary measure. It was reverted back.
“If you want a proxy to be able to use AIM’s direct connection features without port forwarding, you’re forced to pay money.”
Bandwidth costs money. File transfers are sending large chunks of bytes from user A to user B. It isn’t free. We even had a free alternative - if you had AIM 8; AIM mobile apps; etc, all file attachments would work, those worked differently. Everyone’s file attachments would work.
We were monetizing the access to our servers, not to the clients.
It has been shelved, but considering the server would be moderated, there would be checks in place, and piracy wouldn’t be allowed.
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Out of curiosity, Why was Nina using scripts from AOL that uploaded to AOL’s actual CDN?
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free
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But it is for MSN Messenger, which has the same functionality (with Switchboard acting as the proxy in this case, no port forwarding or payment required), despite having more users. Why is that?
So that once again means the bandwidth argument is moot, because that would be using just as much bandwidth at least, uploading the file and then re-downloading it on other clients.
Nobody should be forced/coerced into financially supporting the server. Especially when it’s clear that’s only a relatively small fraction of what the funds were actually used for.
The clients require a server to have any functionality. They are useless without a server. At best this is a pathetic attempt at being pedantic. At worst you’re intentionally misinterpreting what I said to cover y’all’s own asses.
Funny because I vividly remember higher ups talking to donators/other staff members in the donator chat about about uploading their music collection, and whatnot. Napster, of that era at least, is synonymous with piracy.
So solve the root issue instead of punishing everyone who hasn’t forked over cash for something they had no involvement in. Which you ended up doing later on, but that’s what you should’ve done from the beginning.
Imagine if Discord had a data breach or a surge in spam, and their move was to prohibit access to anyone who didn’t have Nitro. What if the same happened to X, and their move was to prohibit access to anyone without X Premium?
What’s stopping them from forking over the $2 and continuing to spam? If they’re that dedicated, then not much really.
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Hilarious fucking statement, I’m going to print this out and frame this on my wall.
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died 2020
born 2025
welcome back messengergeek drama
jesus fucking christ
i don’t really know what to say at this point besides that crosstalk seems very promising (especially given their still-wip wlm '11/'12 support), although personally i don’t really use im revivals anymore.
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If you give us 35 dollars we’ll give you access to AOL. The brand or the service? 
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I thought it was 20 dollars?
Maybe unless they use another revival or RAS.
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NINA contained the only complete implementation of AIM 6.0 - 7.5 (RAS’s is usable but not yet complete) + 8.0, ICQ 7/8, and AOL 4 - 5. There is no other fully complete implementation of those clients yet. And they take advantage of this fact to profit off of people’s nostalgia.
The first 2 (unsure about AIM 8 for legal reasons but the underlying protocol it uses, WebAPI, will be supported) are planned to be implemented by CrossTalk and the last by P3OL, however, but that is still far from complete.
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I’ve been away from the Escargot/MessengerGeek scene for a very, very long time but seeing all this go down has been incredibly disappointing as someone who’d been using Escargot since mid-2017, and the way things have been handled here by their staff is no better. Seriously depressing stuff. I have faith in CrossTalk as a service from a few days lurking around (got some of my old friends to hop on and it’s been very nice), but the fact any of this happened in the first place is nuts.
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Yeah maybe your right, I have been a long time escargot user, and i see that they gatekeep most of their services under a donation, I have tried Crosstalk and it looks rlly promising.
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