the blog of thide

you, my friend, may be interested in CrossTalk. its as close as one can get to the old messaging experience w/o time travel, but it suffers from the same issue all non-mainstream messengers do; it has a low usercount and in my experience coaxing people onto it is even harder than onto Jabber since you have to install some insecure, dated software, which is seen by the uninitiated as a bad thing. still, you can look at AIM chatrooms, of which there are two, and theres some semi-frequent conversation there.