“They say you die twice. One time when you stop breathing and a second time, a bit later on, when somebody says your name for the last time.”
I just realized that Lemmy instances are similar. For example, feddit.ch shut down last month, but some posts live on as they were federated with other instances. The original instance won’t be entirely gone until (unless?) every instance that it was ever federated with is also gone.
The TLD TL;DR is basically that domains don’t come out of nowhere. Just like how you need a lemmy.zip domain to be able to have the subdomains next.lemmy.zip or old.lemmy.zip, in order to have the domain lemmy.zip you must first have someone to run the .zip top-level domain (in this case, Google)
Like Forester mentioned in the other comment, you can have any combination of letters you want as a TLD, you just have to set up and manage all the infra for it (or find somebody else to do it for you)