Excuse my ignorance, but you can set up your own Discord server? I thought it‘s a SaaS kind of offering.
I sort of prefer "guilds" for technical reasons, too, and also from enough work on Discord bot development where that terminology is far more common because it is in all the API documentation. But I think a lot of that ship has sailed for non-technical reasons of "it is just how everyone talks about Discord".
(Also, technically Discord does shard the heaviest "guilds" in its server clusters in such a way that the technical resemblance to "server" isn't far off if you want to feel better about the non-technical "server" terminology.)
Related, one can host separate search index/public frontend for a Discord server with Answer Overflow https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36383773