ICQ, a once-popular IM, is shutting down on June 26, it says on its website. It once served tens of millions of users daily.

  • Ledivin@lemmy.world
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    6 months ago

    Serious question: did anyone here actually know it was still around? I’m one of the more tech-savvy people I know and haven’t touched ICQ in well over a decade at this point

    • MNByChoice
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      6 months ago

      I didn’t realize it could shutdown. Thought it was more like irc.

      • 4am@lemm.ee
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        6 months ago

        Nope, it was much closer to AIM than IRC.

        Also, IRC also depends on servers and, well, many of them have shut down 😔

    • Godort@lemm.ee
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      6 months ago

      Not at all.

      It’s been well over 20 years since I’ve heard anyone talk about it, and its probably been 25 since I used it myself.

    • toofpic@lemmy.world
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      6 months ago

      I was working in Russian IT sector at the time when the government tried to block Telegram. For a few days we had some communication problems because we ised TG for all project chats and communication with most customers. We worked as contractors making an app with/for Mail Ru Group (now the whole company is rebranded as VK, but it’s actually a lot of different businesses). This is when I got to know that product manager I was working with was also the product manager for ICQ. And that we had to switch to fucking ICQ for daily conversations because that was their default backup method. Crazy!
      I found out that it was facelifted up to the point where you couldn’t see the difference between it, TG or WhatsApp.
      After about a week, TG was updated and it had a dynamic server connection (not a hardcoded one), so IP blocks stopped working and we returned to tg.
      I still remember my number from the 2000s: 173114498. Though I lost access to that account a long time ago