2y ago

Why do Lemmy instances have such obscure TLDs?

Whenever I come across a new lemmy instance, it most likely has some sort of obscure TLD (.world, .ml, .ee, .me, .social just to name a few). Why aren't there more with more common TLDs?

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More desirable domains available and significantly lower costs are a couple of reasons that come to mind..
- I got lemmy.cfd for $1

I'm going to guess cost plays at least some part. Obscure TLDs are usually cheaper.
- I'm surprised there aren't more .app/.dev given Porkbun is giving them out for free.

lemm.ee is on the Estonian ccTLD because the person that runs it is in Estonia.

Because we can.
- Surely you mean
  Because ICANN
  
  Yes, your way is better. Take my begrudging upvote.

I went with .boo for mine due to cost and the fact that I’ve never seen it as a TLD before. There are a lot of interesting new ones out there now, might as well use this opportunity to try it out. (Also as an instance admin I’m not trying to make any money off of running an instance so keeping costs as low as possible is ideal)
- I'm still waiting on a .ninja. The only site I ever saw with one was basically just serving an animation with ninjas.
- I haven’t seen this one. Cool!

I was just looking for a funny name and came up with waste-of.space
It is 3x more expensive than a .be (my countries TLD) but I like it.
- You'd have to come up with a pun that's ends in be to change, and that's just not OK :D
  
  Waste-of.be just doesn’t have the same ring to it.
  
  or-not2.be

Cos its considered cool and people follow the herd.
For techbros a while ago an .io domain was a thing because its sounds like i/o and projects an image you are tech literate.
- honestly .io is still a good one, but it's expensive.

newer tlds are cheaper and you can get cooler names

Because we feel like it.

Our .fyi predates the lemmy instance by a few months. The owner thought the domain was funny and bought it a while back, but had nothing to do with it so it just got used when we decided to get a lemmy instance up. So I assume at least some of them are random domains people already happened to own anyways.
But the main reason is the one people already mentioned and its because they are cheap.
.ml, .ee and .me are howevet not obscure. They are country TLDs (Mali, Estonia, Montenegro).

Starting in 2012 ICANN started introducing a bunch of new ones partly so there's more addresses and also so that the names can better express the purpose of the site.

A ton of new tlds became available a few years ago. A lot of newer sites use them, not just Lemmy servers. Older sites that have already been established for a while will obviously be using the standard endings, so if you compare lemmy sites vs well-known sites that have been around for a while, then that's the reason.
- It was a big point of contention when they first proposed the tld expansion because established brands didn't want someone squatting on their name in and alternate tld and doing who knows what with it.
  A lot of the fedi sites I think use them just for the creative play on words people come up with. Even the most common tlds are not that expensive unless it's something with history already, on the level of less than $30/year usually.

After you log into your own instance, you don't need to remember any other url, so instance urls don't really matter - it's just an address for the instance.
Less sought-after domain suffixes are significantly cheaper to register than .com and you can usually get what you want for a prefix (main reason)
Lemmy instances are not dot coms by nature so they may as well be something else.

Cheap+suitable for gathering of people

Can a Lemmy instance be a subdomain?
- Yes, sh.itjust.works is an example
- Yes :)

I'm literally on .net, should be a classic

i tried going to lemmy.com and it worked! it forwards to lenm.ee

There's a few reasons, as well as the ones listed:
.ml is a Mali domain which was being given away, so a lot of people snatched one up. This is now coming back to bite them on the ass as Mali want them all back.
Some are run by the same team, like the .world ones who have lemmy, mastodon and I think calckey. I don't think the same goes for all of them (but it may do - the .world ones are just the most high profile examples), .social just makes sense for a Fediverse social media instance.
- Just to clear something up, CalcKey is now known as Firefish(.social) and that's run by a completely different person.
  
  calckey.world (which runs firefish. firefish.world was afaik taken before they became aware of the rebranding) is ran by the same person as mastodon.world and lemmy.world, i assume that's what they're referring to

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