About the Service
EST. 2026 · PROTOCOLS OF 1996 · ONE OPERATOR
The internet used to be a place you went. We kept the door.
What this is
YiffCloud is a private, members-only recreation of the mid-1990s walled-garden online service. Real mail, real IRC, real AIM, MSN and Yahoo!, a homepage of your own, network printing, finger — all answered by one account, over the same protocols your vintage machines shipped with. No emulators, no shims: an original client from 1996 signs on because we speak its language natively.
The garden is closed on purpose. Nothing inside reaches the live web; nothing on the live web reaches in. The modern site you are reading now is only the front office — billing, the member portal, and this handbook. Everything that matters happens on the other side of the wall.
Why it exists
The machines still work. The protocols were never the problem. A small internet run by someone you can name beats a big one run by nobody in particular. Nostalgia gets you in the door; after that the service stands on its own: your mail arrives, your buddy list lights up, your page serves. That is the whole pitch.
How it is run
One operator, one machine, one bill at the door. Membership is invite-only and every account is IP-locked: the retro ports open exclusively to addresses members have authorized, and to no one else on Earth. There is no tracking inside the garden and no advertising by default — the only ads you will ever see are ones members chose to host on their own pages.
YiffCloud is a hobby service run with production manners: real subscriptions, a real firewall, and no promises we cannot keep. Read the Terms for the letter of it.
The machine
One Linux box in the cloud runs the whole garden. The modern edge terminates TLS and serves the site you are reading; behind it, a single process speaks every dead protocol natively — OSCAR, MSNP, YMSG, IRC, SMTP, POP3, FTP, finger, LPD, IPP, even the DNS your machine asks first. A dozen retro ports, each opened per-member by a firewall whose default answer is no.
Nothing in that stack is an emulator or a translation shim. When AIM 3.0 signs on, it is talking to code that learned OSCAR the hard way: from the wire, packet by packet, until the client stopped complaining. That is also the acceptance test for everything else we run — the stock client of 1996 is the spec, and the spec does not negotiate.
The house style
If it was on the wire in 1996, we serve it straight. If it was not — it stays outside.
When in doubt: finger fox@yiffcloud.com and ask.