The cost of a (word).com domain can be tens of thousands of dollars if nobody owns it to millions of dollars if someone does. The cost of a (word).social domain is like $10.
Yup, this is why most Fediverse platforms are hosted on domains with TLDs that seem unusual (.social, .io, .ml, .xyz, .land, etc). Since most of these projects are funded by donations (if funded, at all), the domain is an excellent place to cut costs on a project like this.
You can register a second level domain (e.g. “google”, "lemmy”, “cnn”) with a specific TLD, resulting in a domain name (e.g. “google.com”, “lemmy.social”, “cnn.com”)
So Social is the domain, and Mastodon/Piefed are the instances in my example?
If that’s the case, why not make everything (instance).com?
The cost of a (word).com domain can be tens of thousands of dollars if nobody owns it to millions of dollars if someone does. The cost of a (word).social domain is like $10.
Yup, this is why most Fediverse platforms are hosted on domains with TLDs that seem unusual (.social, .io, .ml, .xyz, .land, etc). Since most of these projects are funded by donations (if funded, at all), the domain is an excellent place to cut costs on a project like this.
The cost of a .com Domain can be under $10/year
I just bought bitwaba.com for like 8.49 a couple months ago.
.com, .net, .org, and .social are called Top Level Domains
You can register a
second level domain(e.g. “google”, "lemmy”, “cnn”) with a specific TLD, resulting in adomain name(e.g. “google.com”, “lemmy.social”, “cnn.com”)We have our instance on
.cafor example, since we’re a Canadian instance. Other instances might use.eubeing in the EU, or.frfor FranceSome instances pick the TLD (.com, .ca, .org, etc.) to have a fun name. For example, https://sh.itjust.works
Not really.
Both mastodon.social and piefed.social are domain names that point to instances.
The last part of the domain name after the dot like .com or .social doesn’t really mean anything.
Because using .com for everything is boring, especially when you can use TLDs like .ninja .dad .rocks or .party
The real reason is we will run out of useful .com domains sooner or later, so adding more TLDs means more people can affordably rent a domain