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” has sadly been misappropriated by Discord to mean something like group, and a younger generation grew up on that and would be even more confused by that than “instance” (as seen by countless attempts to explain “server” in a federated chat context).
it’s kinda vaguely similar though… a fediverse instance is moderated by the instance admins, just like a discord server (though discord has a level of admin above server mod/admin i’m not sure that distinction matters for the general user)
The Discord use of the term is more similar to a community on Lemmy, which also has its own moderators.
This is how I see it:
It’s not a perfect comparison, but that’s at least how I see it.
It’s arguably used wrongly on Discord, but not in a way that’s radically different from how I already thought about “servers” in the sense of “something you connect to”.
It seems more like a term they picked because it has that familiar sense. Otherwise I think there’s a semi-official term, “guild”, too.
It may have been inspired by earlier chat systems where a server served a similar purpose?
Right. Discord is IRC-like, but all of the “servers” are just a logical separation within Discord.