Convore is pretty new, but have you tried it for private chats? When it was announced, I immediately started to think how much easier it would be to set up for my non-technical co-workers.
Tying you to the browser is only slightly better than tying you to a single client; textareas are not the kind of place you want to spend much time. I'd be game if there were an Emacs client.
It's true that there aren't a lot of clients out there for Convore yet. There are quite a few Convore projects started on GitHub (https://github.com/search?q=convore&type=Repositories) and more clients are welcome!