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

  • poVoqEnglish
    19•9 months ago

    “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).

    • PupBiru
      8•9 months ago

      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)

      • poVoqEnglish
        9•9 months ago

        The Discord use of the term is more similar to a community on Lemmy, which also has its own moderators.

        • @[email protected]English
          2•9 months ago

          This is how I see it:

          • Discord server = Lemmy instance
          • Discord channel = Lemmy community
          • Discord thread = Lemmy post
          • Discord replies = Lemmy comment threads

          It’s not a perfect comparison, but that’s at least how I see it.

    • amio
      6•9 months ago

      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.

      • KSP AtlasEnglish
        1•9 months ago

        It may have been inspired by earlier chat systems where a server served a similar purpose?

    • TimLovesTech (AuDHD)(he/him)English
      1•9 months ago

      For me:

      • Instance = MMO bosses. Part of the server, but doing your own thing, seperate from the rest of the server.
      • Server = a large number of people that can interact and talk with each other.

      But also me:

      • Server/Instance = An individual connection point to the whole (Lemmy in this case), with it’s own rules/policies, but can interact with the whole unless they become unstable/spammy, at which point they are removed (Lemmy = defederated).
      • Lemmy = The IRC network. You can have netsplits (different instances coming and going that effect each other), but they all talk the same language and really for the most part doesn’t matter what server your on.

      Discord = I do not understand. It’s like if you mashed IM and IRC together, but broken, and doing nothing well. Why anyone uses it is perplexing.