Because it's no longer 1996 and there are domains beyond ccTLDs and com/net/org?

"Weird" TLDs tend to be cheaper. .social is also supposed to be made for this in the first place

The real reason is because it's expensive to get a short and good .com name and also because it's very corporate and boring.

FOSS people have...weird taste in naming stuff. See: GIMP, GNU, et al.,

lemm.ee's admin is Estonian, so that one at least makes sense.

They look better and more quirky than the "usual" ones. Also, sometimes they might be even cheaper

Cost of domain name tends to be cheaper with more obscure Top Level Domains (TLDs). .com .org .net TLDs are expensive because they are popular and high in demand. You have to rent them out most of the time. Many are already claimed so you either have to buy the owner out or wait till they stop paying and it expires if you really want it, .xyz is very cheap and uncommon on the other hand thus pennies on the dime per year to rent. Also depending on where you live and your occupation you can actually get a domain name for free through registering with specific services that actually for real own the Top Level Domains. If you are a citizen of a certain country you can get a .us or .cad or .eu .ml domain ect either for free or very very cheap.

Check out this list for all TLDs and if you qualify for one for free. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Internet_top-level_domains

Heres a free domain name registar thats quite promising from the looks of it, most likely the one that lemmy.ml uses https://www.freenom.com/en/index.html?lang=en

i own a .xyz domain, the .com equivalent was 50 times more expensive

Why does ICANN allow so many weird domains to begin with? Domains used to be a good way to tell if you were going to the legit website.

.com - commercial entity .gov - government only .edu - educational entities only .net - network providers (ISP) only .org - non profit only

Those days are gone.

Now there’s Startrek.website and Startrek.com — how does the user know which one is owned by Paramount/Star Trek?

New gTLDs have been released constantly since ICANN dropped the restriction. Also consider that a lot of Lemmy instances are run by individuals as a side project. That means they'll reuse or nab whatever cool sounding domain they can get to spin up their new instance as quickly as possible. Corporate websites might pause and consider a more "marketable" domain.

Personal theory of mine is *.itjust.works meant to stand for "It Just Works" until they decided to give this Lemmy thing a go.

Registration and renewal cost plus more availability, most shorter names are taken on the older tlds.

I came up with mine by scrolling through tldlist comparing prices and going with the first idea that popped in my head.

What better place for people to get together and have fun? No ... it was cheap and domain name was available.

Because people think domain hacks are cool, and also, gTLDs are usually more expensive.

Money, money, money, money, moooneeey.

It's fun

It’s fun! From lib.lgbt.