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?

  • Muddybulldog@mylemmy.win
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    44
    ·
    1 year ago

    More desirable domains available and significantly lower costs are a couple of reasons that come to mind…

  • lohrun@fediverse.boo
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    25
    ·
    1 year ago

    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)

  • esty@lemmy.ca
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    21
    arrow-down
    1
    ·
    1 year ago

    newer tlds are cheaper and you can get cooler names

  • infamousbelgian@waste-of.space
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    17
    ·
    1 year ago

    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.

  • thekernel@kbin.social
    link
    fedilink
    arrow-up
    19
    arrow-down
    2
    ·
    1 year ago

    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.

  • Zarxrax@lemmy.world
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    13
    ·
    1 year ago

    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.

    • Monkey With A Shell@lemmy.socdojo.com
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      3
      ·
      1 year ago

      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.

  • flathead@quex.cc
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    11
    ·
    edit-2
    1 year ago
    1. 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.
    2. 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)
    3. Lemmy instances are not dot coms by nature so they may as well be something else.
  • QuinceDaPence@kbin.social
    link
    fedilink
    arrow-up
    11
    ·
    1 year ago

    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.

  • MouseWithBeer@iusearchlinux.fyi
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    10
    ·
    edit-2
    1 year ago

    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).