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.
Uh, OK. I have a Lemmy client on my phone. It doesn’t work with anything else you mentioned. Those are different apps with different features. I need to know if a server is a Lemmy instance, not Mastadon, etc.
This is for you to connect with your server, not for people who are interacting with you via your server.
Clients can be made to work with different servers. e.g Soapbox can work with both Pleroma and Mastodon servers.
My server’s name is communick.news . Can you tell that is a Lemmy instance by looking at its name? You can go look at the API and see that it responds as being a Lemmy server. What if I told you that someone could take another software like GoToSocial and implement Lemmy’s API to make it usable for both microblogging and link sharing? This is perfectly possible, and wouldn’t need to know or care what is behind the API