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’s nothing wrong with doing that, obviously, but it’s struck me as another interesting quirk of fediverse instances/sites. Generally as soon as you visit them you can tell by the site interface or an icon somewhere what software they’re using.
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!
Lemmy is a technology where each instance follows the same rules: acompatible federation API. You want people to know your website is a Lemmy instance.
I kind of see where you’re coming from, and I think the reason I wasn’t thinking of it in those terms is that I see ActivityPub as the more important underlying tech across the fediverse than say Lemmy/Mastodon/Friendica/etc.
I say that in part as I’ve come into the fediverse from Mastodon, where there’s more than two options in play, e.g. Akkoma/Firefish/Misskey/Pleroma/etc. each of which has some commonalities, but also some pretty distinctive features, particularly from the Misskey side. Hell, Mastodon itself even has Glitchsoc, which is what the original instance I joined on that side of things runs.
On reflection, I don’t know that the microblogging instances mix in the name of the software they’re using as much, which you’d think with more options they might be inclined to, but the more I think of it the more I remember a lot of them use some fun, odd names instead.
Also the practice of using a subdomain to indicate which program is running is pretty old. That’s what the www subdomain on so many websites is.
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
Hotmail and Gmail have “mail” in the name, too.
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.
I do wish for more loaf balancing in this world.
i bread it
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.
I probably should have adjusted the examples as like metalbulletins.org to better describe what I was trying to ask.
It’s not strictly the explicit software as part of the address that I’ve found odd, so much as the blending of the software in the names, but I think generally it comes down to the same basic point being made in the different comments concerning domain registration and management.
It’s like the slavish old “www.” nonsense back in the day. It will go away over time.
