ah didn't realize it had gone away. its successor appears to be [0]
now I'm reliving the chaos of the late-00s/early-10s instant messaging apocalypse when AOL sunsetted AIM. Clients like Trillian were absolutely necessary before AIM shut down. Everybuddy was a good linux-friendly client. When I still spent time on IRC, I really really liked Bitlbee [1] with ERC [2]. Gaim was one of the first open-source projects I ever contributed to.
(I'm not saying that there's a connection there, but rather that all the chat protocols started getting used less around the same time for the same reason, which was smartphones becoming commonplace in late-00s.)