I agree. Discord has one of the most confusing UIs I've used for a while. My first exposure to Discord was when somebody told me to join their Discord server - I was like "where do I put in the address?". Slack calls them "workspaces" which is less confusing. The channel interface is also quite confusing, as you say - joining a voice channel is really weird.
Still, the voice quality is way way ahead of anything else like Zoom or WhatsApp. I think that's probably more important than anything else.
I do wonder if they'll rename servers to 'communities' at some point. A recent blogpost[1] referenced Discord as being made up of communities. As someone with a tech background who game to discord through gaming, servers did make sense (in the sense of old multiplayer servers (pre-matchmaking) rather than IRC server hosts).
Now that Discord has a far more diverse population beyond your more hardcore gamers, I think softening the jargon would be positive. They've already started to move the tone of some of the more playful messages[2] to improve UX for a broader audience, so it may well move away from the current terminology before too long.
Discord's "server" language is a throwback to non-centralized voice chats like Teamspeak or Ventrilo, where each group of users really would run their own chat server. I wouldn't be surprised if they drop that language eventually, especially since most of the users who would have recognized it have probably already migrated.
Interestingly, Discord's developer documentation and API still consistently calls them "Guilds", which I find a much better name, personally, but of course is even more of a term with gaming baggage, and "Server" was the eventually official neutral choice after that.
That's part of what I mean by gaming baggage, it's generally not a common word in contemporary English parlance unless you are a gamer or a history buff (and obviously there's an overlap in that Venn Diagram; part of why games use the term so often is how much medieval-inspired fantasy infuses the history of videogaming).
Though the medieval history is its own baggage as well that would likely keep Discord from wanting to use the term publicly in sales marketing: medieval guilds were predecessors to modern unions and there's at least a few potential enterprise companies that would balk at using a union term for chat groups.
Yeah that's another thing: in "direct" (non-server) group conversations, the text chat and any voice/video chat for that same group of people belong to a single "conversation" entity. But when it comes to channels on a server, "text channels" and "voice channels" are disjoint categories. There are just lots of little inconsistencies like this that muddy one's mental model.
It's completely natural now but I remember not realizing it and forgetting how to join the first few times. Also accidentally joining voice channels etc.
yes it is. must be something else about it that confuses them. I guess having joining a voice channel be one click could be considered odd if you are not used to initiating a "call" that allows people to hear you immediately like that.
You get used to it quickly, but it is odd. Putting an explicit "Join" button with some relevant icon next to the channel name would be much more intuitive. It would also clarify, for example, how you leave the channel. Once you're in one, a separate "Leave" button appears at a totally different location in the footer of the UI, but I can't honestly be sure whether or not clicking the channel name would also do the job of backing you out.
I think the discomfort in this case comes from the semantics of clicking an item in a list. Every desktop interface for the last 25 years has taught us that clicking a list-item means "select". This works for text-channels, and I can kind of see how you might stretch that definition to joining a voice channel - though that's more of a "significant action", which traditionally warrants an actual button - but it makes absolutely no sense for leaving a voice channel.
Still, the voice quality is way way ahead of anything else like Zoom or WhatsApp. I think that's probably more important than anything else.