The Nina & Escargot Drama: How it happened and Its conclusions

Hello Everyone! In my last blog post, I talked about my opinion on IM Revivals, I also mentioned about the “drama” on Nina and Escargot.

If you didn’t know, Nina and Escargot is a well-known IM Revival that does MSN/WLM (Escargot), AIM, ICQ, Q-LINK and Napster (Nina), It has been going very well unlike Phoenix (which is another revival but worser in security because of their ddos attacks in the previous years)

Continuing on, It happened on September 16 25 at 12:26:50 (retrieved from archive.org), when the nina.chat displayed a message when trying to access the site (the discord was also shutdown at the same time because something happened, you can find more info here):

Earlier then, On September 13, a topic was created on MessengerGeek by auora_b0real1s, MessengerGeek is a well known forum active since 2015-present (you can find the full topic here):

Since then, the discussions have been endless, some from tonyshowoff (the leader of Nina and Escargot) and some from Aminadoria (a mod for Nina and Escargot discord and sites)

There was some drama that came forward in the topic, including a response from HIDEN (lead dev of CrossTalk) to Animadoria after she said: “We were monetizing the access to our servers, not to the clients”:

I, myself was also involved in the topic a little bit, one of my replies:

And then, On November 3rd, this showed up on the now defunct nina.chat site:

The image above showed that everything (social, web etc) was moved to escargot.chat, indicating that nina and escargot is now one name for the project, but I (including others) think this is not going to work since Escargots (including tonyshowoff) lost their reputation.

As of 22 November, nina.chat has put this up on their site:

As seen in the pic above, it is mentioning that they had never shutdown (or are shutting down) due to the claim that it did, and is stating the website is closed for now but the servers are still up so you can still access the clients as of 22 November 2025.

Earlier then, One of the contributors (walkingphasers) and possibly another one got removed from the credit page on escargot.chat circa september:

Before:

After:

This made some people a bit mad, but back to the main drama – then, some messages got leaked about the “shutdown”

And then, epicness, one of the team members from escargot, posted this:

with the caption: “He only cares about the money and the media coverage” (tonyshowoff), when it was a skype-related discussion between epicness and tonyshowoff.

So In conclusion, After everything we covered:

• Tony is a Money-Eating Ass
• Escargot may never recover after its loss of reputation
• Some members of the team (including anima, when we talked about the removal of some contributors) aren’t involved with escargot anymore (forgot to talk about that one)

So yeah, that covers all about the drama, and wow, that was the longest blog post i have ever sat through.

anyways, the credits goes to:

• Internet Archive (archive.org)
• MessengerGeek (wink.messengergeek.com)
• Escargot News (escargot.chat/news)
• and all of the people whose images I have taken from the MessengerGeek Topic!

Anyways, I will see you soon in another post sooner or later. See you soon!

PS: Im continually updating this post, if you think something is wrong or if you want to add on, email me at plagg@chivanet.org