Away Message
"Idle since 2008. Back online."
If you grew up in the early 2000s, you remember. The door sound. The buddy list. Agonizing over the perfect away message that somehow needed to be funny, deep, and feature Fall Out Boy lyrics all at once. You remember checking if your crush was online, typing "brb" when your mom needed the phone, and the way that dial-up screech meant the internet was about to happen.
AIM shut down in 2017, but it really died years before that. Somewhere around 2008, everyone drifted to Facebook chat, then texting, then everything else. The buddy list went dark.
I built Away Message to bring it back.
What It Is
Away Message is a real-time chat app that recreates the AIM experience — theactual experience, not a sanitized tribute. Windows XP window chrome. The original door sounds when someone signs on. That chunky progress bar. The whole thing.
There's no sign-up. No email. No password. You pick a screen name and you're in. Just like the old days, except nobody has to get off the phone first.
How It Works
You pick a screen name, hear the door sound, and you're online. You can DM people, join chat rooms, or set an away message (obviously). The whole thing runs on Socket.io, so messages are instant.
Here's the thing I'm most proud of from an engineering standpoint: messages are completely ephemeral. The server is a relay, not a database. Your messages pass through and are never stored — not in a database, not in logs, nowhere. When you close the tab, your conversation is gone. The server literally can't read your messages because it doesn't keep them.
Chat rooms work the same way. Anyone can create one, people come and go, and if a room sits empty for 24 hours, it disappears. Like it was never there.
The Stack
Nothing fancy, and that's intentional:
- Next.js for the frontend
- Socket.io for real-time messaging
- Postgres for the bare minimum (active screen names, room names, who's in what room)
- Railway for hosting
- 98.css for that authentic Windows XP look
- Original AIM sound files for maximum nostalgia
Why I Built It
Honestly? I missed it. Not just AIM specifically, but the feeling of the early internet — when going online was an event, when your screen name was your identity, and when talking to people felt spontaneous instead of algorithmic.
Modern messaging is better in almost every technical way. But there was something about the simplicity and ephemerality of those early chat days that we lost along the way. Every conversation doesn't need to be archived. Every interaction doesn't need a read receipt. Sometimes you just want to sign on, see who's around, and talk.
That's Away Message. No history. No algorithms. No data collection. Just chatting.
Try It
Head to awaymessage.io, pick a screen name, and turn your sound on. Trust me on the sound part.
brb