A method for light-weight fork channels for clustering is disclosed. The method includes receiving, by a processing device, a message at a main channel used for group communication between processes executed by the processing device, identifying a fork channel identifier (ID) and a fork stack ID in a header of the message, processing the message with a fork stack corresponding to the fork stack ID in the header of the message, the fork stack comprising a subset of protocols of a main protocol stack of the main channel, and providing the message to a fork channel corresponding to the fork channel ID, wherein the fork channel to utilize the fork stack to separate messages for the fork channel from the main channel.