[bdimcheff]

Yes, as lotyrin pointed out below, the backend is already effectively an XMPP <-> Websockets bridge. Every time a user logs in, one way or the other we need to establish a connection between the websockets backend and the XMPP backend. The backend does do other things besides simply proxy, and we certainly could separate out the part that needs to keep the state. This deployment strategy is effectively a way to avoid having to do that work, at least for now.