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Comment by 2Gkashmiri | Hacker News Reader

I never understood discords use of "server" Maybe a community but why "server"?

For people who were used to Ventrilo and mumble and teamspeak, the concept of "server" is well understood and Discord is essentially a voice/chat server as a service with unified identity.

But in those cases people actually hosted a server, right?

In discord it's more like a slack workspace, right?

The people "hosting" a discord "server" are not actually running hardware anywhere that runs the server?

98% of the people hosting "servers" of any kind in the world are not actually running hardware, everything is timesharing compute on a hyperscaler's computer now.

But yes, a Discord server is equivalent to a Slack workspace. It's just inherited terminology.

My understanding is a lot of residential isps would be angry at you for running servers of a substantial size out of your house anyways?

That's correct. Discord co-opted established terminology for its own ends and it was very successful.

For what it's worth I never actually hosted a ventrilo server either, I always just paid a service to do it. Pretty much the same experience as discord is today.

Correct, they are not hosting. It's a service. Still, an admin of a Discord "server" has complete control over the server - access, permissions, roles, etc.

i think it sorta comes from user slang, they call it, or at least used to call it "guilds" instead of servers

When they were a gaming oriented platform they were called Guilds. They still are in the API. https://docs.discord.com/developers/resources/guild

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