Fediverse

Server is the best term. It’s the most accurate and it’s already understood by the masses because of discord servers. Especially since people know anyone’s can create their own discord server and still talk with anyone rose on discord (through dms or visiting their server) so it makes it really easy to understand the fediverse and lemmy if we just call them servers

Of all the words I would come up with to replace instance, proxy would probably be very near the bottom of the list.

For me the first thing that comes to mind is the websites we used back in school to circumvent the school network filters. I suspect that's probably the case for a lot of people who would be confused by the term instance enough to be put off by it. Others would probably think "it's proxy for what? Why shouldnt I go right to the actual source instead of going through a proxy?"

Server would probably be my first choice if we wanted to ditch the instance terminology, and off the top of my head, host, home, hub, portal, access point, provider, node, center, affiliate, axis, and core, would all come to mind before proxy (and most of those I wouldn't consider to be better terms than instance, though still far better than proxy)

If we were to use a different term, I'd probably go with something like "provider", like "email provider" or "internet service provider" or "phone service provider", you'd have a Lemmy provider. Providers tend to be associated with mostly interoperable things so it fits alright.

Anything else is a wild misuse and abuse of technical terms that have actual meanings. Discord already murdered the definition of "server" with calling their spaces "servers" banking on user ignorance and familiarity with the term to sell them on a completely different kind of service.

Bigger instances run on several servers, maybe even distributed geographically. They're definitely not proxies. Host could work but it's a bit nondescript. Hub doesn't really sell the decentralization aspect. Even server doesn't quite do it anyway, since thanks to Discord people now associate that with isolated spaces anyway.

Instance are far from being simple proxies. While instances can act as proxies for other instances, the aim is to have each instances to have their own communities and be somewhat self sufficient. If you remove the federation, Lemmy (and other fediverse software) still work, it's just that it is more difficult in that case to reach a critical mass of users.

Proxy is inaccurate. Server is a better term.

Instance is the best name for it as instance implies replication and federation. Server isn’t incorrect but also a server doesn’t necessarily mirror content which is why I think instance is the most correct term for fediverse services. I don’t think change the vernacular for instances is going to make it easier to understand for people who aren’t technical though. I think just referring it to mastodon/lemmy/whatever is fine and then I would tell them to sign up for lemmy at lemmy.world or sh.it.just.works etc like you would tell someone to sign up for email at google or yahoo

Choose a tour bus.

It would be simpler if users didn't need to understand the details of federating to join in the first place.

This is actually a really good idea. Anyone familiar with Discord will get it very quickly, as the concept is sort of similar and they don't really need to understand how it works behind the scenes, they don't need a perfect understanding of how it really works, just how it behaves to them.

And for people who do like accuracy, we're also in luck, because they are in fact servers!

Let's do it.

"Format" or "initialise"? "Directory" or "folder"...or maybe "drawer"? It's already termed "instance" for a few years now by the Devs, so...

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