As I mentioned above, I'm not sure it is possible to successfully use Friends if either party is firewalled. If it is possible then it might be a little problematic.

I haven't used WireShare chat for over 4 years. The difficult part is the setting up with a friend. There are 3 types of communication protocols. GMail, Jabber and Live Journal. This can be set up in Settings > Miscellaneous. Set both your preferred communication type and enable Sign into Friends when WireShare starts. After doing this you will be prompted for your gmail, jabber, or live journal ID and password. However you can sign in manually each session via the menu bar > Friends > Sign in.

These days with GMail it is more difficult to log-in via WireShare due to GMail/Google's stricter security policies.
"Google prevented someone from signing in to your account using a non-Google app." If you receive such an email after failing to log-in with WireShare then choose the ‘Yes, it was me’ option. Also https://myaccount.google.com/lesssecureapps setting should be enabled to ON. That will prevent such blocking of logging-in in the first place.

If you know a fellow WireShare user's gmail, jabber or live journal address then you can send them an invite to become a friend via WireShare. Once logged-in you will see more options in the WireShare menu bar > Friends menu. You can use the Add Friend option. You can also set the Available or Do not Disturb options.

For chat, you will have a chat option and chat window within WireShare (on the right-hand side.) For gmail this conversation is duplicated within gmail so you can communicate either way.

Setting up private shares: Choose the My Files tab top-left of WireShare. There you will see a Private Sharing or Friends tab. You can create custom share lists and add whichever friends to each list.

An issue we noticed mid-decade was the updating of the private shares in real-time. Adding fresh private shares sometimes does not update for the other person immediately. Re-browsing/refreshing host sometimes fixes this. We consider this a bug.

You will notice for WireShare the chat option is limited to Friends. Unlike LimeWire v.4 which allowed you to chat with any other public hosts on the network that also enabled chat. Not many LW 4 hosts around any more.