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?
.io is still used for a lot of things, although I saw a discussion on hackernews yesterday about how .io shouldn't really be used as it is a ccTLD for the British Indian Ocean Territory, not a general top level domain like .com.
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.
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)
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).
This is speculation but I imagine its because newer and more obscure TLDs are registered less, so you're more likely to get the one you want. It's a lot harder to get the .com you want than the .social you want.
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.
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
.world is a firefish instance. not the main firefish instance (which is .social).
so when I said, “it’s not the same person running it” - the flagship instance, if you will, is .social. many of the main people coding it are on .social (afaik). .world is just another instance.
that was i meant, if i need to clarify : the main main people coding-wise are not the same. the flagship instance (which is not .world) is not run by the same people as the mastodon flagship instance.
“the flagship instance” (if you will) of Mastodon is mastodon.social. not run by the same people who run firefish.social. they are not the same thing, run by the same people.
that’s what I was getting at. i guess I only make sense to myself.
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