[dwaite]

I'll say that we did have efforts early (pre 1.0 Jabber) to do leaderless communication and build rooms on top of it.

Back around 2000 getting information on building eventually consistent systems was much harder than it is today, and leaderless versions of that doubly so. Those who worked on it felt like they were inventing half the techniques themselves, had difficulty recruiting (teaching) new people, and eventually burnt out.

If those involved had gotten it to work, it would have just been core infrastructure for eventually consistent ordered events, with UX concepts like "rooms" built on top as common business logic. Or in other words, distributed apps.