cross-posted from: https://programming.dev/post/3658116
or maybe some other terminology would be better? lots of people get confused when you ask them to choose an instance, sometimes I think even the word “proxy”, “host”, or “hub” is simpler
the specific terms aren’t my point, just a discussion to see if we can come up with a better name
Server is the best term. It’s the most accurate and it’s already understood by the masses because of discord servers. Especially since people know anyone’s can create their own discord server and still talk with anyone rose on discord (through dms or visiting their server) so it makes it really easy to understand the fediverse and lemmy if we just call them servers
I think Discord actually is destroying meaning of “server” for many people. It should be called “communities” or “guilds”. Server is not an abstract division between communities, but an actual machine serving and processing data, so you really can’t create a Discord server unless you reverse engineer their code.
Pretty sure the only reason Discord went with the server terminology is because they were competing with TeamSpeak, Ventrillo and Mumble which were all actual servers people would host.
They completely murdered the meaning of the term just so they could advertise as “look how easy it is to make a Discord server! You don’t even need a server or mess with firewalls and IP forwarding and Hamachi, it just works!”
I fucking hate it.
i know discord servers are run on your own servers but us using the term would both be accurate and be understandable by the average person.
No, calling Discord groups/communities/guilds “servers” is not accurate and is totally wrong. You cannot create your own Discord server and Discord would never let you.
It’s like calling Facebook a website hosting, because you can create a “site” on it.
I haven’t been on FB for several years, but ugh there was a while in the late 2010s when so many people over there were referring to FB groups as sites and just arghh arrghh aaarrgghhh.
This is actually a really good idea. Anyone familiar with Discord will get it very quickly, as the concept is sort of similar and they don’t really need to understand how it works behind the scenes, they don’t need a perfect understanding of how it really works, just how it behaves to them.
And for people who do like accuracy, we’re also in luck, because they are in fact servers!
Let’s do it.
