Why do so many European instances use the name Feddit?

Sunshine (she/her)@lemmy.ca to Ask Lemmy@lemmy.world – 71 points –
29

I believe, feddit.de was first. Then the admin of feddit.it thought it was funny and copied it, and then it kind of became convention...

For me feddit.uk stuck out as when I was joining Lemmy, (my initial choice was lemmy.world), it seemed like it would be a safe bet as it was clearly set up by UK based people that had also come from Reddit like myself, so it had a sense of familiarity. I'm guessing that's why the other feddit. also became somewhat popular instances.

Guess it's short for "federated reddit"?

Probably because someone started and then all the others saw it and went with it? I'd say it's the same dynamics as if you're the first one parking your car in a (not so obvious) no-parking zone, and you come back two hours later and there is a whole line of parked cars behind your's. It's kind of inevitable, especially after the second person did it...

And I mean it's a bunch of instances named like this. But not an outrageous number... We have quite some diverse names for instances. And lemmy.something is the other super popular choice.

I only know the one.

Probably an incomplete list of feddit instances:

  • feddit.org (formerly feddit.de)
  • feddit.uk
  • feddit.nl
  • feddit.it
  • feddit.dk

Really disappointed that italy doesn't have fedd.it

Especially since fedd.it redirects to feddit.it. Wow, now I'm actually disappointed.

feddit.ch was discontinued but active for a bit

It's probably a more expensive domain and they might not have wanted to commit to that when it was still a small instance...

It's the same tld, they have the same recurring costs.

Same TLD ≠ Same costs if they took over from someone that sold the domain.

Wait...feddit.de changed to feddit.org? What happened?

The admin vanished unfortunately.

If I remember correctly, he went on some vacation late last year and said he wouldn't have internet, so he gave someone from the community admin permissions. But he didn't give them full access to the server or something like that, so when one day the hard drive had filled up and the instance was quite broken, there was no way to re-install and restore from a backup.

For a long time, the instance didn't allow picture uploads and we just hoped for the admin to return like:

Unfortunately, he didn't. Pretty sure, we still don't know what happened to him.

Well, then feddit.de was completely offline for a few weeks, and when it came back online, the community voted on a new domain name to use and a few folks coordinated on a Matrix server to set it all up.
When feddit.org was all online, moderators of the feddit.de communities put up notices that the community migrated, in case anyone finds out later. Some communities also migrated to https://discuss.tchncs.de.

It was certainly an interesting stress test for this whole federation thing. In theory, everyone could've just joined any other Lemmy instance and in theory, we could've just set up the same communities elsewhere. But in practice, you're hardly going to get all the same people into the same place without being able to coordinate.
It would've helped to spread out the communities beforehand, but that's also easier said than coordinated...

We very nearly lost feddit.uk to the same issue. The admin who set the instance up just went AWOL, I'm guessing he spun it up during the reddit exodus and then just lost interest in the project. Fortunately people managed to contact him and gave two people admin access to take over it.

Lessons learned: don't join an instance with a single admin.

Goddamn I can only hope he just forgot about the project as opposed to something bad happening to him.

I’m very new, so I’m not sure, but what I’ve heard is that the guy/gal that ran feddit.de had more important life things to deal with, so the community stepped up to create a new instance to replace it.