AOL chat rooms are gone, completely, right for 3 years. So you can’t access them anymore. Actually, the discontinuing process took right 10 years. In 2010, AOL shut down access to AOL rooms via AIM. And in 2020, the company shut down AOL Desktop Gold access to chat rooms.
The reason was simple – a decline in usage. In the 2000s, they were one of the most popular ways to connect with other people, but they haven’t managed competition with competitors, so the company decided to eliminate this service.
AOL chat rooms were a good way to connect with other people and find new friends, but now they’re gone. And here’s what you can use instead.
Discord
This app was originally aimed at gamers, but now it connects people from different areas. There are a lot of servers, and you can launch your own server to gather your friends here.
On the server, you can communicate with people via text chat, gather for voice talks and upload videos.
There are also a lot of Discord bots to automate the server’s managing process like bots automatically assigning roles to server members and bots playing radio on your server.
Imho, Discord is the best replacement for AOL chat rooms; you can make your server private and gather there only with your friends, or you can join a public server to meet new people there.
Facebook Groups
That may be, frankly, the one I don’t like. But you can join Facebook Groups and Communities. Many of them are on different topics, so it’s easy to find friends here or engage other people in your interests.
The great thing is that Facebook profiles aren’t anonymous, so you can learn more about people without asking them about something personal.
All information people are here; you can not just communicate but get more info about who’s on the other side. But, well, that may be the side a lot of people don’t like, as they want to stay anonymous.
I think you know about how Reddit is organized, but if not, here’s how: there are a lot of communities, so-called /r’s, usually created around some particular topic. You can create your own community or join the existing one.
Actually, Reddit has a lot of interesting information and interesting people behind it, so the right-chosen community may be interesting and fruitful for your life and give you a lot of interesting to know.
But be careful; that’s quite hard to start up on Reddit, don’t post links to other sources right when you create an account because mods may think you’re spamming. Better start with some conversation/questions or interesting information you can share.
If you want to create your own community, you can make it public or keep it private to use it only with your friends.
Mastodon
That’s a decentralized social network. It consists of independent parts (servers) called instances. Each of them, similar to Reddit (but Reddit isn’t decentralized), is run by its own team of admins/mods.
When you join Mastodon, you will be added to one of the instances you choose. And then you can follow others. There are plenty of them for different topics so that you can find something right for you.
The posts on Mastodon are called toots; when you post them, they would be sent to all servers you’re following.
You can also create your own server and gather your friends here.
The good thing about Mastodon is that it’s decentralized, so no single entity controls the platform, so it’s more free compared to other services listed above.
Slack
Ha-ha, Slack. It’s designed for work and teams, but some people use it to create communities there. I don’t understand what, but maybe you will like it.
You can send private messages on Slack, use plugins, and create channels and groups. But you can’t make your community public, so it will work only if you have people that will join Slack with you.
In my opinion, that’s not the best option for communication that’s not related to work or business, but you can try it if you want.
Telegram
It isn’t so popular in the US now, but it’s really convenient. First of all, that’s messaging app, so you can text or make calls to other people in personal chats. But you can also start your channel by posting some interesting information here. And you can make it public so that anyone can join and read it.
There are also comments available so that you can engage with your readers here.
But the search works awful, so it’s hard to find interesting channels.
Or you can create a group to communicate with your friends.
In my opinion, one of the most convenient ways to gather with other people for interesting conversations.
WhatsApp/Viber
They offer the same things as Telegram, but I don’t like them. But basically, they’re working the same. Both are messaging apps; you can communicate with people in personal chats, create groups and join/create channels.
Since they’re more widespread in the US, maybe they will suit you better than Telegram. So worth trying.
