Our lab is so excited about using Discord to improve remote participation in nuclear fusion experiments that we wrote a press release about it. It really works 
@alans Our setup team made a good decision by being liberal with the creation of rooms/lobbies. During the experiment, it's easy to split off into a smaller room for a quickl discussion. Now the trick will be to keep using it, in some form, even post-pandemic.
@rom I believe it is not possible to self-host (we are not self-hosting). There are some alternative applications that do allow self-hosting, but I do not have experience with any of them. This does seem like a use case that would be feasible for an independent server.