What do you do for Real-Time Communications/Collaboration?

Our community is big and we've got a bunch of people who are interested in having a discord-like interface within the community. They want to use this as a way to level-up on their skills - like a chat channel to discuss things they are all learning - some as novices, some as advanced consumers.

Right now, I don't see a way to do this "out-of-the-box."  We'd like to avoid additional third-party integrations because that just adds troubleshooting and/or setup complexity that's better to avoid if at all possible. (Plus possible legal, privacy, GDPR, etc. issues)

The community has the idea of "friends" and "members" (of groups) and other things, but I haven't seen a way to collapse all of that into a "group-based chat."

I guess this is my ultimate question:

  • Has anyone else run into this scenario? If so, what did you choose for your collaboration solution?