Yes, it was for a chat proof-of-concept app. But the end result ended up being so convoluted I thought no sane person would program like that, so I went back to the drawing board.

Look at _init() here to get a feel of it:

https://github.com/hyperhyperspace/hyperhyperspace-web/blob/...

Your code didn't look so bad to me :)

I think you may have met some of my colleagues working on similar problems at Dweb camp recently.