We have succeded at that for 25 years with my group of college mates. Your description of your group fits perfectly to ours except that our group was from an IT college and that helps with technology.

We started with emails, and some years ago we changed for a WhatsApp group.

During these years we shared and still share, daily news about technology, family, jobs, politics, whatever.

We lost some members for different reasons but the remaining 15, love the place. We are all around the globe now, but this chat make us feel extremely near to each other.