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.

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[–] isaac@microblog.lakora.us 4 points 11 months ago

@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".