I am working in a non-technical non-profit organization and I'd love to see something like etherpad integrated in this. No REPL, but simply only writing texts collaboratively.
i am sure there are reasons to dislike xmpp but throwing out more than a decade of standardization effort without even a word is a bit difficult to understand.
It started off as just a way to play around with socket.io, but eventually ended up as a bit more. Can you do true anonymity with no-signups with XMPP? I don't know a lot about it, but I'll definitely look into it!
If you are interested in what you ask about, Jappix is such an alternative I discovered a while ago when curious about distributed social networks other than Diaspora.