this post was submitted on 01 Mar 2024
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Discord servers aren't meant to be chats, they are meant to be large communities, like subreddits. Discord is a hybrid between a chat app and a social media platform for meeting new people and joining large communities (that's the intention of the design, at least)
Discord doesn't know what it wants to be, they just copied IRC without understanding why it was that way. Catered to gamers due to adding voicechat, then panicked and got confused by the surge of Slack, so they tried to be all serious, but not really, it's a whole mess.
The point of servers and channels used to have a very direct and straight forward relationship with reality, it mapped one to one to actual physical servers and internal protocol structures. Discord doesn't need to have servers and channels, to them they are communities and chat topics. But they don't need to be that either. It is stupid and mind boggling, like Twitter clones using 150 character limits, that made sense when the platform was SMS exclusive, but why would you have such an artificial limitation in a platform that doesn't even admit SMS input? Other than chasing some platform nostalgia or ideological extremism about platform format.
I believe it was clearly inspired fully by Slack, rather than IRC. I don't think there was anything they copied from IRC specifically, and nobody in their target audience (gamers) was using IRC at the time discord blew up, so I don't think that was their intention
But I agree it is a silly use of the word "server" to refer to groups of channels. Internally Discord actually calls them guilds. Server might also be gaming lingo they were targeting (so people would think of joining a Discord server as akin to joining e.g. a Minecraft server)
I actually like the top-level server structure. A community has user roles which control access to certain channels, the permissions can be either channel-specific or server-wide, and the roles are hierarchal with permission overrides specific to users. It makes it possible to have public chats with tens of thousands of users not be overcrowded, and have content organized into different spaces (memes, media, help/support, general, etc.) which just couldn't be done on Skype, which was all people in this demographic were using at the time. And the idea of hierarchal management of permissions and roles allowed moderation of large communities, so everybody moved due to convenience.