"n-once" is my suggestion, looks close enough to nonce for anyone thinking cryptography, and will look sufficiently different for anyone thinking about calling humans nonces

Does that mean that, using the same reasoning, in the word "spooky", saying the pronounciation "pooky" is an extremely rude insult in bahasa melayu, it also needs to be reworded in the upcoming halloween event?

We're talking through this internally - it is a pretty widely-used concept in URLs (short for "number used once", which I didn't know until know). We're not currently planning on changing it as it is actually used in our URLs and we don't want a disconnect between the term in the Quick Launcher and the term in our API.

While I agree on changing the wording, it would possibly break too much, that's probably also the reason why the wouldn't wanna change it. Except if we had a fallback solution eventually, e.G handle both nonce || instancekey .

The nonce (which is a technical term in cryptography) is a random value rather than a unique value to prevent guessing of the instance ID, as documented in https://vrchatapi.github.io/tutorials/instances/

It could be replaced with a term like "Key" or "Instance Key".

Suggested alternate fields would be "unique number" or "uuid".

(Side bar, it's probably best to have a roll-over explanation of these fields for those of us who are not experts at the arcane art of VRC URL formation)