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Yes, for a simple chat system, you should just add the user’s channel name to the groups he’s subscribed to.
However, you definitely will need to model the chat system in the database for a more complex system. Let’s say you have a model Chat, ChatMember and Message. When a user connects to the websocket, he does not need to specify any chat because it is a general connection. Any message sent by the client has to specify the chat, so you can loop through the chat members and forward the message to all who are currently connected.
How do you know who is currently connected? this is the tricky part. In my architecture, I have a group for each user, sort of like an inbox. The group name is generated from the user id. Each user can have several connections, say mobile, web etc. All the connections coming from a user is added to the users group and the user’s number of active connection is saved in an Inbox model. With new connections, it is incremented and decremented during disconnections.
So to know which chat members are currently online, I can just check that the user’s inbox has atleast one connection. If he is online I forward the message to his ibox group, else i store the message in his inbox. Whenever a user connects, he is sent all the messages in his inbox and the inbox is cleared.
This is just an example of a way to implement it but you can also think up a custom architecture or improve on it.