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Comment by superkuh | Hacker News Reader

> So Discord can just take servers from people and give them away to corporations without asking?

He never had a "server". Just like no one has a Facebook "server". Discord is a corporation not a person. Communities run by corporate services are different than servers run by human persons. You give up everything when you don't actually host your own server(s) for communicating with your community.

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A Discord "server" is a colloquial term for the community space. The nitpick is meaningless, I could have an AWS "server", but at the end of the day we both know it's a virtual instance that sits on an actual server.

It's deceitful for discord to use that language because it implies some level of independence.

A VPS service like AWS goes out of their way to specify that it is a "virtual server". the product they provide is analagous to real server hardware and largely interchangable with other server hosts.

Unless your AWS server is a dedicated host...

Individual Discord communities are, and always have been, called "servers", despite the fact that they are entirely logical/digital entities and have no particular correspondence with actual physical servers (the way IRC servers do).

Is this a distinction without a difference?

Meaning, it seems eminently reasonable if I was 16, started a Disney Discord, got a verified badge for it, then Disney pointed out the delicacies of Discord handing the Official Disney Discord to a minor, it seems to be a reasonable compromise to make the official Disney Discord officially Disney's, and allow the 16 year old to still have the secret chats, etc.

There's difference, physical ownership of the server would mean no company would be able to transfer ownership with a click of a mouse.

Even if transfer of rights looks reasonable, it's better to live in a world where such transfer is made through law and not through company managers will.

A more reasonable compromise might be to give disney contol over the discord.gg/disney namespace but leave the existing server and it's community unmodified under the control of the people who actually built it.

In my opinion that was a very clever naming scheme to target the TeamSpeak crowd. In gaming communities, having “your own server” has always come with a sense of pride.

Exactly. This intentional lie by Discord is to abuse the connotations associated with the idea of having a "server" that existed with teamspeak/mumble/etc. But since it's not actually a server in any way, just a service, users act shocked when Discord takes away their community on a whim.

> and always have been, called "servers",

That's not correct, originally they were called "Guilds", which is also what the API and code still use today.

Interesting. I joined Discord fairly early, and they were already called "servers" then—but I have, indeed, seen the "guild" terminology in the API.

I was also in pretty early (account says August 28, 2015) and I have only seen "guild" used in the API. I'm really curious what the timeline is on them being officially and publicly known as guilds and then changing to being officially called servers.

It shocks and concerns me that someone needs to ask that.

Of course they can. It was never "yours" any more than "your" Facebook or Tiktok account.

That may be true in the technical sense, but discord uses the term "server" to refer to the collection of channels (text and voice) that it allows you to create. i.e. individual discord communities are called "servers".

It might not square with the traditional hardware definition of the the word, but it's being used correctly here.

And that technical distinction doesn't matter right up until the moment it does, which is why we're here today. While the distinction is obvious to most HN users, I would bet that it isn't to many Discord users. When Discord users create a 'server', I would bet that many of them do not understand how few rights they have, specifically because they are being purposely mislead by Discord.

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