You cannot and should not separate politics from controversy. Politics is the means through which we address our controversies, and the controversies impact how our political systems operate.
If we didn’t have controversy, there would be no need for politics, we’d all simply agree and do what needs to be done without needing to discuss anything, appoint leaders, make decisions, etc.
If you’re going to get this caught up in worrying about exact definitions, you need to take a step back and accept that colloquial/informal usage of words often differs from their technical definition.
Social issues are hopelessly entangled with politics in the world we live in, it’s basically impossible to discuss one without the other in any real meaningful, practical way. Trying to make that distinction is really a purely theoretical exercise, it’s sort of a “spherical cows in a vacuum” situation, if you try to discuss politics without acknowledging the vast array of social issues that impact them (or vice-versa) you’re left with something too far-removed from reality that it has no real practical applications.
Now that kind of thing can certainly make for some interesting discussions with people who enjoy that kind of thought experiment, but you’re not going to find anyone who’s willing to have that kind of conversation in a space where it’s been made clear that they don’t want to talk about politics.
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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)