Discord sucks. It's propietary and using a CHANNEL (no, they aren't "servers", educate yourselves, FFS) as a documentation source/tool it's the worst thing ever the gen-z had made. Period.
I think by definition you're wrong. By layman's terms you're wrong too. A server serves things, either content, chat text or your meal. Discord servers serve a collection of text channels located on a centralized resource.
Now, for the real lesson: take yourself and everyone else less seriously.
It is simple as that. IRC servers don't refer to a single physical server either since IRC servers supported federation allowing multiple servers to act as a single server. There is no need to be so strict on the definition of server considering how loose its usage was already with IRC.
servers = (
...
{ address = "irc.efnet.net"; chatnet = "EFNet"; port = "6667"; },
...
);FWIW, IRC barely exists anymore. To the extent to which to does it has been massively simplified. It used to be that there were massive collections of servers for most networks run by tons of different people, and often if you ran an isolated server for a single-server network people would show up ply you to add their server to your network. I can see how someone who only casually uses IRC and only semi-recently (in the past decade or two) might be left with a really limited or even confused understanding of the lingo.
So like, sometimes networks did have these DNS round-robin load balancer addresses, and I could see someone getting confused by that for a bit. But, they weren't used all that often other than as a server discover mechanism, because--for a number of reasons I will list a few of--it mattered greatly what server you were actually on... enough so that, if you were to actually to use IRC much at all, it would become very very clear that a network and a server are not somehow interchangeable terms.
1) The Internet itself and the software we were using was flakey enough that you would routinely encounter a "netsplit", wherein people who were on one half of the network could still talk to each other but people on the other would see you all disconnect.
(This was also used by people to try to attack and take over channels by denial of service attacking specific servers in the network as the behavior of re-merging channels often gave you moments where you could take chanops.)
2) The latency across the Internet was sometimes higher--particularly if you had to do multiple hops to get to the right server the user was on--and so people who were on the same server as each other had a lot better experience talking to each other.
3) The channel namespace using # was global to the network but many networks supported server-local channels that were prefixed with ##. If you were on a different server you would thereby not be able to see the same server-local channels.
Nowadays, you wouldn't bother with most of this as, administratively, this is madness. The usual server-to-server protocol forms a DAG and so it doesn't actually provide any form of redundancy: your network feels about as stable as the least stable server (weighted by how close it is to the center of the graph). You also don't need lots of servers to try to distribute the connection load, and the core Internet latency isn't a big deal anymore.
(It's also not clear to me why people in this thread are getting so pedantic about the distinction between server and service. I'm just here to exercise my pet peeve: nothing about computers is obvious.)
Like, what server you were on was a near daily discussion among just about everyone on EFNet in particular, because EFNet was notorious for experiencing netsplits as it was simultaneously enormous and almost entirely unprotected: some networks (I think the big one being Undernet? it's been 25 years so I am likely remembering this poorly... I did a quick search for this and maybe I'm thinking of DALNet?) had come up with this idea of "services" like chanserv and nickserv that would help you register your stuff so it couldn't get stolen; but, on EFNet, every channel worth a damn had to be protected by redundant bots spread across the topology.
https://m.slashdot.org/story/13791
https://m.slashdot.org/story/19167
FWIW, the reason why the Discord usage of "server" kind of pisses me off is because it actively makes it more difficult for users to come to the correct understanding of terms in general parlance: it trains them to use a term "server" in a way that actively makes them understand the term less because exactly one popular service--Discord--has decided to misuse the term... and they do so with the excuse "we just wanted to be analogous to IRC"; but, somehow, they even got that wrong, and so the whole thing comes across as so incompetent as to be negligent and (thereby) passively malicious :/.
(I also probably am a bit more frustrated about Discord than a random commentator because, in addition to having been screwed during the username upgrade last month, a long time ago I was working on a similar service and even had a similar architecture--hell: I was even building it using Erlang; I don't think it was in Elixir, but I was an early user of that also and it might have been... I had two projects: one in Erlang and one in Elixir, and I don't even remember what the other one was--but then Slack came out and I thought I would never be able to compete against them as they had epic UI people... but then Slack chose a target market I found limited and after a couple years of feeling they would have to enter this space, Discord suddenly became popular and I was all like "damn it why the hell didn't I just assume Slack would be stupid?!".)
Picking words people are familiar with in order to convey a concept is a generally smart thing to do. A discord server was meant to be analogous to a ventrilo server. Calling them servers made that idea clear to our users, which helped users understand our product and what purpose a server served. I would say that the term has served its purpose well.
Internally we call them guilds, because having a "server server" is a bit ridiculous.
Discord was likely built by millenials given that the oldest zoomers were not even 20 when Discord was released in 2015.
Server is indeed misleading and inaccurate, though I do fear we lost another war: hacker now means cracker, cloud now means foreign server, crypto now means cryptocurrency, ping used to mean Blackberry Messenger, you name it; these things come and either stay or go again... it might be more confusing to use another term for it (I try to introduce community where possible, but the opportunities are rare) because people have to (be able to) figure out from context what you're talking about.
Webster's says: > a computer in a network that is used to provide services (such as access to files or shared peripherals or the routing of email) to other computers in the network
And if a computer is: > a programmable usually electronic device that can store, retrieve, and process data
How is it not a server? It is a computer, it is used to provide services, it's programmable and electronic, routes content... Do you have to assume each discord instance is running in its own container for you to consider it a server? It serves things.
This argument gets repeated by every generation ad nauseam, even though they're oblivious to the fact that it keeps reoccurring. Everyone loves drawing an arbitrary line in the sand.
What does Discord improve over Kopete by using 20x more resources except for the video resolution?
Also, it should run far snappier if the improvement was just a video resolution improvement and a new codec often accelerated by the GPU such as h264. But it doesn't.