• ccunning@lemmy.world
    43·
    11 months ago

    No. .social is a Top Level Domain(TLD) just like .com, .org, or .net

    They’re no more connected than Facebook.com and Apple.com are.

    Now, they could be run by the same folks; I have no idea on that front, but you can’t tell simply by the TLD

    • Lets_Eat_Grandma@lemm.eeEnglish
      110·
      11 months ago

      Oh god… let’s not get into the nuance of web hosting. Soon you’ll have to explain dns or what a reverse proxy is… or heaven forbid how certificates work to secure it all.

  • Swedneck@discuss.tchncs.de
    5·
    11 months ago

    to a layman it’s probably best to just… not really think too deeply about this, there is layer upon layer of possible nuance and yet at the same time 99% of the time it’s as simple as “if the ‘thing.otherthing’ isn’t identical then they have absolutely nothing to do with each other”.

    To really understand what’s going on you’ll need to dive into how computer networking functions and a bunch of other things, which i do highly encourage since it’s good to know, but the important thing here is that you’re talking about domain names, which i’m not going to try to explain further but rather recommend you look up on wikipedia and other places to learn more about.

  • pe1uca@lemmy.pe1uca.dev
    3·
    11 months ago

    Think of a URL and its dots like folders in your drive where each can have different files in each of them even if they have the same name as another folder.
    They’re just written in reverse order.
    (Also a whole lot of other differences and other technical details on how to actually make the site work, but for your question we can just keep at this)

    So, you have the social root folder (Top Level Domain) which contains many sub folders, one of them is mastodon and another is piefed.
    Each have their own files to render their UI and process the requests they receive, but they don’t talk to each other, even when they might have some files and requests with the same name.
    The same way you have in your home folder your documents, pictures, videos, downloads, etc.
    And yeah, they can go even deeper, my lemmy instance is lemmy.pe1uca.dev, not just lemmy.world like for this community.
    I could have mastodon.pe1uca.dev if I’d like.