The limit that matters is not the limit Discord enforces
A hundred characters is an enormous allowance for something that appears in a narrow column next to a circular icon. In practice the sidebar shows around 24 before an ellipsis takes over, and on a phone it can be fewer.
So a server called "The Official Unofficial Late Night Gaming And Chat Community" is, to everyone in it, called "The Official Unoffici…". Write for the sidebar and the settings page takes care of itself.
Two words, one mood, one place
Look at servers that have stuck around and a pattern shows up. A mood word and a place word, nothing else. Quiet Orbit. The Greenhouse. Respawn Point. It works because the place word tells people it is somewhere to be and the mood word says what it feels like.
Three words usually means one is doing nothing. Adding your game name rarely helps either, since the server is already in a folder next to the other servers for that game, and in a year you may be playing something else.
Discord will rewrite your channel names
Text channels are normalised. Capitals go, spaces become hyphens, ampersands and most punctuation are dropped. "Art & Design" lands as art-design, which is fine, and "WIP / Feedback" lands as wip-feedback, which some people find less fine.
This only applies to text channels. Voice channel names keep their capitals and spaces, which is why servers often look inconsistent: the voice list reads like English and the text list reads like a URL. Knowing that in advance lets you name them deliberately rather than discovering it halfway through setup.
Emoji as a sidebar marker
A single emoji at the front of a server name is genuinely useful when someone is in thirty servers, because the eye finds a shape faster than a word. The same trick groups channels: one emoji at the start of every channel in a category reads as a set.
The cost is width, and width is the scarce resource here. One is a marker, three is a wall. If you want one that matches the topic rather than one that is simply bright, our gaming emoji page and the symbols collection are both sorted by meaning.
Renaming costs nothing, so stop agonising
Server Settings, Overview, type a new name, done. No cost, no cooldown, no broken invite links, and nobody has to rejoin. This is the opposite of a game nickname, where a rename costs real money and you live with the mistake.
Which means the correct approach is to pick something reasonable now and change it once the server has a personality. Most servers are named before anyone has spoken in them, which is the worst possible moment to decide what the place is.
Names that cause problems later
Decorative Unicode letters look striking and break search, both inside Discord and in anyone’s memory when they try to type it. A year or a version number dates the server the moment it passes. Someone’s username as the server name stops making sense the week that person goes quiet. And an inside joke from the first night ages into a name nobody new understands, which is fine for four friends and a problem for four hundred.