500,000+ AOL Instant Messenger Buddy Icons All at Once
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I needed a couple of AOL Instant Messenger buddy icons for a project, and then that turned into a project and before you know it I was trying to scrape every single buddy icon off the internet.I have slightly over 500,000 of them live, browseable, and downloadable with a single click on my new totally non-commercial project site buddyiconarchive.comI think that I am perhaps 20% of the way to my goal of having a "complete" collection of all the buddy icons that ever appeared on the internet, a rough estimate based on the counts advertised by various period aggregators.I am looking to trade icons with someone who maybe has an entire backup of iconator.com or other large buddy icon sharing site. My goal would be to add them to the archive and make them widely available. These sites, it turns out, are not completely archived in Wayback Machine, or at least it would seem.If you can help, there's a contribute files/urls page - https://buddyiconarchive.com/contributeCheers! john
HN · launched Aug 28, 2026 · 8 upvotes (top 53%) · 0 views
Niche: digital art and memorial archives · 49 launches, 4 in the last 7 days ▼ -43% · Explore this niche →
Category and tags
- Horizontal
- Marketplace
- B2C
- Not AI
- Hobby / open-source project
Visit website ↗ Source listing ↗
More like this: all 49 launches in digital art and memorial archives →
Could you build this?
Yes This is a digital archive viewer backed by a scraper; the core application is standard image hosting, search/tagging, and infinite scroll UI.
Discussion
No comments on this launch.
Competitors
Other products that read as similar to this one : 67 launches clear the similarity bar, closest 8 shown.
Attention rank: #29 of 68 (itself plus its competitors, highest first, normalized so YC and Product Hunt are compared fairly).
Launched 255 days after the earliest competitor.
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