I’ve enabled chat in the forum, you should see a speech bubble icon in the top right of your screen, you can create and manage chats from there.
This is not intended to replace conversation threads, but to enable 1-to-1 and small group conversations that don’t merit a thread or post.
Same rules apply to chat as to forum content.
You can invite individuals with @ or create a chat with a hashtag e.g. #TestingChat which can then be shared.
There are a bunch of other features which I’m still exploring but it seems like a decent feature.