Comment by radicality
14 hours ago
I’m similarly annoyed by Discord’s term “server”.
Only recently started using Discord, and joined various “servers”, which seem as basically just groups with chats. When I was prompted to create my own “server”, at first was hesitant thinking “whoa, I don’t want them to provision a whole server for me, that can’t be cheap”, then realized it has nothing to do with actual servers.
In the Discord API, "servers" are called "guilds" which I assume it was the original name for them when they started developing the platform. Don't know why they decided to change it.
In the dark ages of the internet, you had to host a server in things like Ventrilo[1], which was the thing Discord tried and succeeded at disrupting. Since now you can create a "server" for talking with friends (and friends of friends) without being technical.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ventrilo
Suspect, pure speculation, when they pivoted from being focused on gamers, switching from guild to server helped.
Or, even more broad, someone just thought it might and implemented it, irrespective of whether it actually changed anything (discernible from background growth) or not