Miranda IM

» see miranda-im.org as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the last words ~

i was on icq first and then msn for the whole 2000s. Miranda was the thing you installed when you got tired of running both accounts in two separate windows. it did not try to be a network. it was a client, a small gray program that logged into other people's networks and pretended they were all the same thing.

it began around 2000 as Miranda ICQ, a stripped-down alternative to the official ICQ client that had grown slow and heavy with ads. Roland Rabien wrote the first version and then let it become an open-source project. Once people started writing plugins, it stopped being an icq tool and became a socket that anything could plug into. You added a plugin for msn, a plugin for jabber, a plugin to change how the contact list looked, and the program became whatever your plugin folder said it was.

that was the appeal for the kind of user who read donanimhaber and frmtr threads about squeezing the machine. Miranda used almost no memory, ran off a usb stick if you wanted, and never nagged you. i was the demographic that cared about that. a computer engineering student who liked knowing exactly what was running.

~ the record ~

~ what it actually was ~

strip the plugins away and Miranda was a very small core with a very large ecosystem bolted on. The core did almost nothing on its own. Everything visible, the protocols and the themes, lived in dll files you chose yourself. This made it powerful and also made it fragile, because a bad plugin could take the whole thing down and nobody was paid to test the combinations.

~ the fork ~

in May 2012 the development split. Part of the team started Miranda NG, a new-generation rebuild, because the original codebase moved too slowly for them. The fork took the momentum with it. The original Miranda IM kept a website and a final build, but the work had gone elsewhere, and by 2014 there was nothing new coming from the old project at all.

~ the long tail ~

the fork still ships. Miranda NG had a stable release in 2025, which is a strange thing to write about a messenger whose networks are mostly gone. Miranda IM itself, the original, is the dead one. It died the way a lot of good open-source software dies, not from a shutdown notice but from the people who wrote it deciding the next version needed a different name.

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