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.
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.
Yeah but mail isn’t perfectly defining services either since last I checked FedEx didn’t let you share links.