Hey I teach English to refugees as a volunteer. The reality of being an irl refugee is so far detached from what’s going on here that I just can’t fathom the propensity for a refugee to navigate their way into federated forum instance and then suddenly feel unwelcome because people are using an English term in a way that doesn’t directly apply to them.

I work with people who are trying to learn how to get a bus ticket, how to write their names on a piece of paper to get a job, wondering if they’ll ever be able to see their family or if there’s any point in trying to succeed in a new country where they’re barely getting fair access to the same rights as the rest of us. If you really want to do something meaningful for refugees, you could do a lot more than try to police how people talk in some random forum on the web.

Of course it depends on the person, but ensuring that only they are refugees and nobody else is might actually be more harmful than you think. They need community, and seeing the label thrown around in a bit of light hearted fellowship could teach someone to not be disheartened by it.

Nevertheless, just to humor you, I believe “migrant” would be a better word for most users here because many of us just moved away from reddit in search of a better alternative voluntarily. 3rd party app developers, and the users who were forced off of reddit because they needed those apps to interact with it, could be labeled as “displaced”. Mods & users who actually got proactively threatened or outright banned could appropriately be referred to as “refugees”.