>>21
I am not completely convinced.
Why not? If so, I can say I'm not convinced that Diaspora needs a chat altogether - there are tons of XMPP servers around. And if the chat is to be used - it should be XMPP based for interoperability, so its users won't be limited to the web client, and could use their standalone clients of preference as well. And of course for the sake of chat federation with the rest of the XMPP networks. And you don't want to reinvent the wheel - i.e. writing your XMPP server from scratch, when there are already very good solutions around. Whether to run it on the same host or on the other becomes a minor issue if you think of it.
WebRTC is not an IM protocol, it's just an API for browsers to access media streams. XMPP is an IM protocol which uses Jingle for media streams (i.e. VoIP). Making Jingle through WebRTC is a possibility, but XMPP servers should support such thing first for browsers to be able to use them (the same way they need to support Bosh or WebSockets for browsers to even use XMPP itself) I.e. it's not coming out of the box, so someone should research how mature or even existing is WebRTC support in the current XMPP servers. I don't think Diaspora should try to cover it all (i.e IM and VoIP) at the same time - it's a big pile of work really. Making IM (XMPP chat) first would be already a big step. Media calls can always be the second phase.