“Server” has been pretty normalized (albeit abused) by discord especially, so it seems accessible to me?

“Instance” does seem vague and overly techy to me, it’s an oop/code term (think “instantiate the class”) that’s been borrowed for casual use.

“Community=subreddit” sounds pretty good, but runs the risk of being misinterpreted as more of a “community = discord server” thing…

I’m also fond of matrix’s “homeserver”, a server that (while your home) isn’t your only location, but that might be entirely foreign to new users too.

Definitely a tricky problem