I believe this is a tradition that has been grandfathered into voice chat apps. Previous ones like Ventrilo have you actually connect to a private server (that someone pays for / hosts).

I second this explanation. Additionally, from a UX perspective, if a user wanted to join your server you had to give them IP/port/pw and they'd type it in manually. So even the users were accustomed to addressing servers. "Server" entered the community lexicon as "the place we chat".

I assumed it was based on IRC servers, because each Discord server can have multiple "channels" just like IRC.

This is most likely the case. Discord's introduction was mainly to pull in the gaming audience using Skype while providing the quality behind Mumble and Ventrillo

Users colloquially call such communities "servers" because Ventrilo and TeamSpeak historically required actual servers for each community. The terminology has stuck. Discord definitely made the correct decision calling them "guilds" internally and "servers" for user-facing material. Nearly every user has always called them servers.

They used to be called Guilds, even in the user-facing client. I'd imagine a conclusion was drawn at some point that the term Guild is far too niche even inside the already niche video gaming community; its really only used in MMORPG-style games.

Agreed. I feel like if I told a non-gamer friends to join my Discord 'guild' I'd get less yesses than if I called it a 'server'. In a way 'server'/'community' feel like much more inclusive terms.

And even in the niche of MMORPG games, it's just one variant of name for the (relatively) permanent groups that players usually organize themselves in. It's rather common in the fantasy/medieval-type MMORPGs where it actually has its origins, but uncommon in pretty much all other themes, especially anything scifi. Eve Online for example calls them "corporations", which is a better fit for a science fiction universe. Anarchy Online just called them "organizations", while Star Trek Online calls them "fleets".

So yes, "guild" is a really bad name for the thing pretty much anyone in the target demographic is used to call "server", whether that thing actually was a physical or logical server or not. "Guilds" also used to have a voice "server" to host their voice chat activity, but they did never equal themselves to their voice server, so even if all games out there called groups of players "guilds", it would still be a really bad choice. Someone at Discord apparently learnt on the job that "naming stuff" is one of the two hardest problems in IT ;-)

I'm a programmer who well knows what a server is to a programmer, but I'm also a gamer and Discord calling its servers servers never seemed weird to me. From the perspective of the user, the term makes sense. The servers have users, those users have permissions, they host files, they host chat, you can install plugins to them.

It would have taken my community a lot longer to switch over from our Teamspeak server [0] and come to Discord if they were called guilds.

We don't play MMOs, aren't very organized, have a very flat hierarchy, (admins, regulars, new users) and don't stick to one game very long.

The word guild comes with too much baggage, and that single word choice would likely mean we'd still be on Teamspeak to this day. I don't think I'm exaggerating that point either.

I never considered "server" a poor name, even knowing that it was probably not one dedicated physical server in reality. It's simply the right nomenclature for the target audience.

[0]: A Teamspeak server is definitely a server as I assume you define them.

Server is the de facto standard terminology that users expect here. Guild would be a horrible name since it comes with a lot of preconceptions, especially for gamers.

Discord started as a gaming app, so most likely a "guild" was their first "grouping unit" and the name is now just legacy.