Jim Gettys wrote:
Unless the Jabber protocol has changed a lot since I last worked with it (a few years ago), it's very much a client/server protocol and would be hard to adapt to a serverless environment (a Jabber server is a very heavy thing so I'm not sure electing them on the fly will work).Jabber looks like the most promising protocol for that; we can either elect machines to be jabber servers dynamically, or work on making jabber more peer to peer. And jabber also has the concept of store and forward messages (part of why it is probably our best bet as a technology base for IM).
There is already a P2P chat protocol in use thanks to iChat, which works pretty well, and it seems Gaim implements it. Updating it to use Avahi rather than Howl would be a lot less work, and give most of the flexibility.
thanks -mike