At the start of the pandemic Discord had the killer feature unmatched: active voice room discovery. You could see where people where, and how many were talking at a glance before you joined a room.
That's the single most useful feature of discord, but recently element integrated jitsi rooms and showed active participants. I think matrix is now good enough "enough" to replace discord.
Yeah I feel the same way. I just can't get any matrix client to give me the same experience I get with discord. I know they're two different programs, and that if I started with matrix, discord would be weird, but still. It's annoying
While that is true, that's also not what people mean when they say 'servers' in this context. No of course they're not actual servers, but that's what they're called and I don't think anyone is under the impression they're actually servers
Internally they are called guilds, but "publicly" they're called servers. When you interact with the API you use guilds, but the Discord client itself doesn't use that term - it only uses "Server" as far as I can see.