It’s wrong in terms of the technical implementation and right in terms of user experience.

Gamers are well familiar with different communities actually hosting servers and instances for games or voice chat pre discord. Discord offers the same experience but without physically being different servers. Keeping the name guides users in the same way OSs call it a recycling bin despite not actually being a bin.

I'm not sure it matters in this situation ...? Server/instance/VM/shard/... when used in this context is pure corporate naming BS. They'd have called it "setting up a new circle jerk" if they thought it would increase metrics

Fun fact: Discord called them guilds before realising that they could compete with paid services that set up actual (e.g. Mumble) servers for you by pretending this is equivalent and free

I also have trouble going along with the doublespeak. If a supermarket called their beer apple juice, I'd also not be offering my friends "apple juice", I'd call it what it is

Guild is innocuous enough and since the API docs still call their communities that, that can be a term to use among those in the know to have common and clear terminology

'Guilds in Discord represent an isolated collection of users and channels, and are often referred to as "servers" in the UI.' —https://discord.com/developers/docs/resources/guild

This seems like a distinction without a difference. If you used a paid service offering Mumble servers that used some custom software that allowed them to offer multiple ... "servers" on different ports/IP addresses from a single daemon, would you really care?

Focusing on the fact that it's not really a "server" because they aren't running as separate processes seems like utterly silly pedantry, and we probably don't even know if that's actually true regarding Discord or not.

The distinction matters. The cost (to my users) of switching from one Mumble server to another is the same, regardless of who hosts the server. The cost of switching from one "Discord server" to another is much lower than the cost of switching between Discord and any Discord clone, keeping people on Discord.

That's not some inherent feature of it being a server or not, that's a feature of Discord offering much more features than Mumble.

No, it's a feature of Discord putting all the "Discord servers" into one program, but not allowing third-party servers to be listed in the same program. A rival system offering exactly the same featureset as Discord is nonetheless not interoperable with Discord, whereas a Mumble rival could easily be interoperable with Mumble clients.

A server, to me, you have control over if that's the product name of what you rent. Discord servers are as much yours as Hacker News is yours

It's like pretending a taxi is the same as owning a vehicle, even if the taxi company was your neighbor and there's always someone available. The result is the same but the distinction couldn't be clearer. To me it's similarly misrepresentative to say you own a car when you live next to a big taxi station, as to say the SaaS web front-end you get on Discord is a rented server

That definition sounds a lot like it would exclude services renting Mumble servers. It's difficult to reconcile this with your previous comment.