Socket.IO is great for building real-time systems like chat. It's effectively a nice wrapper around WebSockets, with the ability to fallback to other methods for browsers that don't support it. We just used it to implement real-time collaboration at BaseDash, including a chat system like you're looking to build.

Node.js is probably the correct choice, especially if you're already familiar with it You'll probably still need to build an API to send requests to your server, and then use Socket.IO to push messages to your clients. This will let you authenticate users and store messages on your database so you can retrieve them later. PostgreSQL and MongoDB are good options for your database, you should be fine either way. Don't worry about speed, they'll both be sufficient.

React on the front end makes it really simple to handle real-time updating data. Again, even better since you're already familiar.

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