All creativity leaves your body as you are buying a domain.

Each fediverse service needs its own domain and cannot share with others.

So we put them as subdomains, (service).domain.com, so we can run multiple under the same top level domain.

The majority of Fediverse instances are run by volunteers at their own cost or subsist strictly on donations. Domain registrations can get expensive and are a variable recurring cost*, so subdomains (which are free) are the natural choice. That also leaves the apex doamin available for other purposes.

*The cost to renew each year can change and often goes up.

Because Lemmy is bigger than one domain. If it were just one domain it would be Lemmy.com, but since it's federated, the names must be different, but you still want people to know it's a Lemmy instance because they all interoprate.

"Hmm, what's bajesus.com? Oh, its a Lemmy instance. What's lemmy.bajesus.com? A Lemmy instance, of course."

Lemmy is a technology where each instance follows the same rules: a compatible federation API. You want people to know your website is a Lemmy instance.

A bulletin board might one day change to entirely different back-end and migrate all of the posts and users. That's highly unlikely you're going to do that with a Lemmy instance. It will always be a Lemmy instance or it will go away. You're not going to migrate the content and users to some other technology. And even if you did, you can buy a second domain easy peasy!

Hotmail and Gmail have "mail" in the name, too.

As someone with senior experience in cloud engineering here is my input, naming things is hard.

And God forbid you decide down the line you need a sub domain the terror of having service-b.service-a.com give me the chills.

But yeah 100% naming thing is difficult so you end up naming it after the software and using the group as the parent domain

Lemmy / Mastodon is the social network. To show that your server is part of that social network, they include it in the name

Yes, it would be very weird for server addresses to have the service name as a subdomain. Like a common prefix of web servers to signify that it's serving world wide web.

On a more serious note, this used to be fairly common for many protocols to ensure loaf balancing between different protocols - you'd have one server for www, one for ftp, and so on.

Also, from an administrative point of view, it's more manageable when you can, for example, add an entire (sub)domain to the firewall rules.

It kind of makes me think of how odd it would have been if many of the old forums named themselves like bookclub.phpbulletin.com, metalheads.vbulletin.net, or something.

There were hosting services for forums in which free or cheap tiers were on a subdomain like that. I think what you're asking is the inverse though, e.g. mastodon.alostinquirer.org. I find that odd too, as it creates a weird situation if the person hosting it wants to use different software for the same purpose, e.g. Pleroma or Firefish for microblogging instead of Mastodon.

Because the nerdy engineers hosting these are not great at naming things.

With mine, it just sounds like let me and I just played with that.

Answer 1:

with an old forum like running phpbb, it doesn't matter to the user what the site is running. if it works, it works.

with the fediverse, because it is interacting with other instances in a way forums never even conceived of, it is really important to the end user what software is running. the software is center stage.

Answer 2:

The blossoming of the threadiverse in the past 6 months has prompted/necessitated the creation of a lot of "general purpose" domains.

Your examples are bookclub.phpbulletin.com and metalheads.vbulletin.net. But most lemmy instances are not themed around literature or music or anything else. More apt example would have been phpbbtalk.io or chatvbulletin.xyz. Such sites did start back in the day. But in the absence of federation they were not likely to cohere. So you don't remember them, if you ever found them in the first place.

it feels like this is an artifact of the immaturity of the platforms.

they start out as personal or small collaborations, and those users are likely to utilize the software name. the first wave of 3 parties are likely to mimic the source instance.

i was also curious about this, but really, its just that there hasnt been time for devs to really commoditize fediverse software and non-project related folks to see the apps as a marketable solution.

I just do software/service.ohaa.xyz cause I dont wanna rent more than 1 domain (Iactually have 2, need to move my website to ohaa.xyz)

It's like the slavish old "www." nonsense back in the day. It will go away over time.

@ALostInquirer@lemm.ee I think part of it is the "branding" of Mastodon - if everyone someone follows uses a Mastodon server, they might just think of "Mastodon" as the social network they want to join, and never really consider that other people on the network might be using something like Firefish or Pixelfed or microblog.pub. After all, most Mastodon servers' web UIs look pretty much the same and the default Mastodon name and graphics are often pretty prominent.

I don't think this is usually an issue, but there are some Mastodon instances out there whose names are `mastodon.[something] and I think that can mislead people into thinking that's the one they "should" join just because it seems "official".

Another thing is that ActivityPub uses the hostname as the unique identifier, so I don't think you can easily switch from Lemmy to KBin or something like that if you're trying to use the same hostname as before

well mine is not named after the service, and I thought having the user handle as @@no.lastname.nz quite fitting for a decentralised, semi-transient social media