Not sure but I think Schwab did it too.

I don’t want to get pedantic about this. There’s two reasons the “original” lemmy uses ml as its TLD:

1. It’s cheap
2. They can claim it stands for what we’ve been talking about.

Perhaps “tongue-in-cheek” was the wrong descriptor. More pointing out it has nothing to do with Mali, but sites haven’t been using TLDs properly for ages now.

The ml stands for “Marxism-Leninism” as a tongue-in-cheek joke rather than anything to do with Mali. Similar to how a lot of domains ending in .ly (i.e. bit.ly) has nothing to do with Libya.

Ah, so if you catch it early it’s a coin flip? Nice.