We've come a long way and we're almost there (Patreon)

Thanks to your support and viewers like you, we're now approaching alpha-access to AIM and ICQ, with AOL coming a bit later. We've been working on finishing up the backend services which basically run the whole show, and we've had to redo some of our very early work which is why it has taken so long. This new approach was largely from lessons learned about the growth of Escargot, scalability problems caused by that growth, and lessons retroactively implemented that were learned many years ago.

I realise that may be a bit confusing, but it's difficult to explain in lay terms. Essentially we wanted to launch AIM/ICQ (and later AOL of course) from a starting position that it would never go down. We did not want a repeat of Phoenix -- not that really was ever a possibility anyway -- and we wanted to be sure our security was top notch. So we also did some other things, like adding "legacy password" support, that is to say, a password specifically used for old services which do not have SSL, so that you can safely get on to old versions of AIM, ICQ, AOL, and even MSN without risking the password you manage your account with being compromised.

We've also been implementing other services to bring out all the niche-case uses of AIM, AOL, etc including things like blogging, permanent messages, online shopping, though that last one is a bit delayed, Animadoria has been spending a lot of time working on it, but it is very large. 

Essentially we're trying to restore all the services and improve them, and try to find ways to help fund it beyond Patreon -- which may or may not be successful, but at least we gave it our best shot and did it correctly. We figure the worst case scenario is that we have it working, the options are there, but maybe it doesn't bring in the revenue we hoped, but at least AIM, AOL, etc won't ever go down again.

There's more to discuss, but we want to really outline that for Patrons after we launch so we can give a totally accurate story on what we did, decisions we made, and how we built the entire system. It's no longer a monolithic service, but a lot of tiny services that we can scale out as we grow and hopefully save money on hosting.

In the run up to this launch we've been more active on social media, and if you haven't yet seen it, we're on the following social media platforms:

* https://twitter.com/escargotim (previous post had wrong URL, sorry!)
* https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCCCvuisZYT8pSk2G7yO91ZA
* https://www.facebook.com/escargotim
* https://www.reddit.com/r/ninaim/
* https://instagram.com/escargotim

Please consider following/promoting us on any of these platforms. Currently some are more active than others, but we are trying to get them going as much as possible, especially in the near future.

Finally, thanks for all your support, it's really helping keep some of the hosting bills paid for the services we already have running (Escargot), and it will help us more in the future going forward.