Pornhub.com has nothing to do with Jesus.com
not with that attitude.
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?
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.
Mastodon.social is the address to that specific Mastodon instance. Take a look at this site for more info.
why not make everything (instance).com?
I’m not exactly sure what you mean by that? Are you suggesting everyone to use a ().com? If so, because they are rarely available and if they are, quite expensive.
.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
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
.com is for commercial sites (though many sites misuse it). Most Mastodon instances are not commercial.
We need some Lemmy gold, because tht comment desserve it
@aihorde@lemmy.dbzer0.com draw for me A small statue of Lemming made in gold, inspired by award given at ceremonies
there are already a few versions of lemmy gold floating around, but they arent used much. i like this one
The devout Christians currently going through a crisis on whether to go with “Jesus is in all of us, thus yes” or “Our boy J don’t want none o’ that nastiness”.
No. .social is a Top Level Domain(TLD) just like .com, .org, or .net
They’re no more connected than Facebook.com and Apple.com are.
Now, they could be run by the same folks; I have no idea on that front, but you can’t tell simply by the TLD
Oh god… let’s not get into the nuance of web hosting. Soon you’ll have to explain dns or what a reverse proxy is… or heaven forbid how certificates work to secure it all.
If I have a house in Orange County, California, and another house in Orange County, Florida, do I technically only have one house since they’re both in Orange County?
Bro is trying to cope with the fact that he bought same house twice 💀
Bro is testing the limits of the community name.
/jk it’s better to have a stupid question than no question at all
I’m sorry about your confusion. Please start another thread, though, so people can focus on answering OP.
Surely you could see that my response was a rhetorical question in an answer to reflect upon the absurdity of the OPs question.
No. I see you making fun of someone for asking a question. They are trying to apply some of their knowledge to something new. What they have learned from some other good answers is useful going forward.
Sadly, it seems you need to learn more to be able to understand where this person is coming from.
I think in your analogy, the county should be variable instead of the state.
I mean, it communicates the same point. The two are unrelated even though they have the same county name, just like websites share the same TLD and are completely unrelated to each other.
Those two domains are as close to each other as google.com and facebook.com or thepiratebay.org and wikipedia.org or mit.edu and stanford.edu
To make the point more explicit: sharing a TLD doesn’t mean shit.
to a layman it’s probably best to just… not really think too deeply about this, there is layer upon layer of possible nuance and yet at the same time 99% of the time it’s as simple as “if the ‘thing.otherthing’ isn’t identical then they have absolutely nothing to do with each other”.
To really understand what’s going on you’ll need to dive into how computer networking functions and a bunch of other things, which i do highly encourage since it’s good to know, but the important thing here is that you’re talking about domain names, which i’m not going to try to explain further but rather recommend you look up on wikipedia and other places to learn more about.
When it comes to identifying the server, hostname the first thing that counts.
lemmy.worldormastodon.socialorgoogle.comare three different hostnames. At this point you can basically treat the period as no special character, it’s just part of the funny world. This basically answers your question: those are two different domains, ie. for all purposes, different instances.However, your computer does not really connect to hostname but to IP address, so the next important thing is to translate the hostname to an IP address.
Aside: a valid hostname does not even have to have period in it. For example,
localhostis a valid hostname! But generally hostnames without periods don’t get translated to any useful IP addresses.localhostis probably the only one widely used hostname but your OS will translate it to a special IP address which marks your own device.)So to translate the hostname to IP address is done using so-called DNS. So before you can connect, your computer already knows an IP address of a DNS server, and asks it to translate the hostname to IP address. Technically, this is still not where the period is strictly important.
Where the period does start to be meaningful is when you think about: so we have billions of IP addresses, billions of hostnames, how do we organize it all? Who is going to maintain the huge massive list?
So it works like this: There are dozens of organizations, each of which is assigned one or more “top level domains” (TLD). Then they are responsible for maintaining lists of all hostnames ending with those domains. Many of these organizations are local to certain states. For example, in Czech Republic, where I live, we have organization called CZ.NIC which maintains all domains ending with
.cz. So it’s up to CZ.NIC how it manages permissions and gives out the domains. In this case, basically anyone can register any free domain ending with .cz, and what this registration means is that now they can get a server with an IP address, run whatever they want and have the registered domain name point to that IP address.Note that other organizations may decide to add additional rules. For example
.ukdomains are managed with extra rules, where non-government (commercial) entities are normally allowed to register only.co.ukand other.uknames are not handed out easily. I don’t actually know the details about.ukbut my point is that if you are going to think about a hostname and how to begin to understand who owns it, first thing that matters is the TLD, and from that point the rules might be slightly different. To be fair, I haven’t seen much variance between this; almost all public TLD’s I’ve seen were either “simple”, meaningmyname.tldor this thing that UK does (also New Zealand, from the top of my head).One almost universal rule is, though, that if I, say, register
seznam.czwith CZ.NIC, then I automatically get not onlyseznam.czbut also any address I can possibly come up which ends with.seznam.cz.foo.seznam.cz,bar.seznam.cz,www.seznam.cz, I can now start organizing my servers using this whole infinite space, with any number of extra periods. I could totally start a business and start promoting my serverfoo.bar.baz.whatever.czon billboards, as long as CZ.NIC grants mewhatever.cz.So back to your question:
mastodon.socialandpiefed.socialare two completely different domains. All we know that they have in common is that whoever registered them, had to deal with the same organization; that is whoever maintains.social.So TL;DR: there’s really nothing that suggests that they would be the same instance.
