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)