Why do a lot of fediverse instances put their software (i.e. Lemmy/Mastodon) in their name somehow?
Why do a lot of fediverse instances put their software (i.e. Lemmy/Mastodon) in their name somehow?
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.
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.
You also can't reuse a domain between software installations (some exceptions apply when migrating between software of the same "family tree", e.g. migrating from a mastodon instance to glitch, or migrating between misskey forks) due to how federation works. Hell, reinstalling the same exact software can break federation if you wiped your database in the meanwhile.
Some software offer a "split domain" option where the software itself is installed in a subdomain like mastodon.example.com but with user handles on a separate domain (usually the root domain, like @example.com) but I am not too sure on the reusability of that, and it's not an easy thing to implement (Lemmy won't deal with that correctly and will always use the full domain for anyone on a split domain instance). There are also a handful of software (like Takahe) which let you "bring your own domain" so to speak.
Domain registrations can get expensive and are a variable recurring cost*, so subdomains (which are free) are the natural choice.
Or for personal instances like mine, I don't even know what I would name it that would make sense to have as a whole TLD.
It would be nice if it supported domain delegation like Matrix does.
I'm generally not a big fan of how Lemmy just assumes its got the domain all for itself forever. I would have liked to have the webfinger API live on the root, so I can have clean handles and community names, but the inbox endpoints and UI would be on a subdomain.
I've been thinking of making some proxy thing that can intelligently route ActivityPub from the root to Lemmy/Mastodon/Pixelfed and whatnot so that they can behave like one big instance and browse the same content but differently, but it sounds like as big of a project as making Lemmy itself.
I've been thinking of making some proxy thing that can intelligently route ActivityPub from the root to Lemmy/Mastodon/Pixelfed and whatnot so that they can behave like one big instance and browse the same content but differently, but it sounds like as big of a project as making Lemmy itself.
That's basically what SRV records accomplish. When I looked a while back to see if ActivityPub had support/plans to support them, I landed on, I think, a Mastaton feature request where the response was "won't implement SRV" because "webfinger already does that" (it does not).
Personally, I think SRV records and webfinger solve different problems and can complement each other. The ActivityPub software would lookup the SRV record matching its platform and use the result from that to query the correct webfinger endpoint to resolve the user's URI for that platform.
I have no idea why SRV records seem to have fallen out of fashion, but they would easily solve the delegation problem since that's exactly what they were designed for. lol
Yeah, I made a new subdomain "Lemmy" to www.mindoki.com.
Edit: for those who didn't get it, so to go to Lemmy it is now lemmy.mindoki.com
I mean what should I have done? It's a Lemmy server, not an instance so who knows what it'll end up being. And dead.mindoki.com seems a bit too foreboding.
Cheers :-)
back in the day, it wasnt uncommon for people to use exchange.whatever.com for their email host, clearly exchange being the microsoft product.
i prefer either an abstract name (smurfs) or something specific to its purpose.
in my ancient world view, www. is your website host, mail. is your email host, etc. a good generic for the fediverse would be something like social.mydomain.com
then if you change software, you don't have to lose connectivity.
i went loopy with moist.catsweat.com running mbin
When it goes up you can usually transfer to another provider for a decent discount. I recently did this with one of my domains when godaddy went nuts on a renewal for a domain I've had for like 10+ years at this point.
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!
you still want people to know it’s a Lemmy instance because they all interoprate.
No, no, no. I don't care that the server on the other side is running Lemmy, kbin, mastodon, wordpress or some dude running his own scripts. The only that should matter is that everyone uses the same protocol. The server should be nothing but a detail.
That’s highly unlikely you’re going to do that with a Lemmy instance.
If this whole threadiverse thingie ever takes off, It's highly likely that Lemmy will not be a good fit for the majority of users. We will likely have servers working only to validate and relay messages from clients, and data will be fully distributed (instead of replicated to every instance). Any substantial growth will quickly show the limits of the current architecture.
You do care, though. Mastodon is a social network. You want to know if this server is part of that social network. Lenny is the same, even if "social network" doesn't apply to it in the traditional sense.
Not all the networks on the fediverse interoperate, and that's not even the goal with activitypub. All servers of the same network should interoperate, but Pixelfed doesn't and shouldn't need to integrate with Lemmy, for example.
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.
Activitypub is the protocol. Mastadon/Lemmy is the API. Just because two applications share a protocol doesn't mean they can talk to eachother.
The Spotify app uses the HTTP protocol, like your browser does, but that doesn't mean you can view any webpage from the Spotify app. Idk if activitypub is actually a protocol, but it is at least analogous.
While it makes sense for apps/networks of a similar type to interoperate (like microblogging), apps/networks of different types may not make sense to integrate.
So for servers on the same network/app, it makes sense to include it in the server name, so that people know what app/network it belongs to.
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.
Hotmail and Gmail have "mail" in the name, too.
Isn't that more akin to instances having "social" in their name?
More like "fediverse" instead of "social". Facebook is also a "social", but it does not communicate with other fediverse instances. The fact that you are federated and share content is what should be in the name.
And behold: many instances DO use fediverse over lemmy in their name.
But Lemmy is not perfectly compatible with Mastodon and kbin. At the time some of the instances were made, Lemmy could not even federate with Mastodon at all. So it makes sense that instaces explicitly picked a name with Lemmy in it.
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.
I do wish for more loaf balancing in this world.
Permanently Deleted
Because the nerdy engineers hosting these are not great at naming things.
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.
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.comandmetalheads.vbulletin.net. But most lemmy instances are not themed around literature or music or anything else. More apt example would have beenphpbbtalk.ioorchatvbulletin.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.
@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".
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.
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
