alt Hacker News> There is no need to come up with "local TLDs" like .vibe, .local, .test and so on -- there is already an industry convention! macOS and most Linux distros support subdomains of localhost, so <anything>.localhost works.
That would work if your goal was to route traffic to localhost.
What if it isn't?
There are reasons why the likes of example.com exists.
Replies
It looks like this will win: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/.internal
example.com, and the reserved TLD ".example", exist for technical documentation and writing. If you are writing a comment on HN, or a curriculum for a networking class, then you can discuss "foo.example.com connects to bar.example.com" or "Let's hypothesize about two offices called accounts.example and human-resources.example"
The "example" domains are never supposed to reflect anything that is actually deployed onto LANs, or test labs, or the Internet, current situation notwithstanding.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/.example
There are, likewise, IPv4 and IPv6 ranges that are reserved to be used in documentation. Not the 192.168.0.0/24 or 10.0.0.0/8, but separate ranges that writers only write about, and are never deployed, not even in private.
localhost is only ever going to be the loopback interface, never across a network: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/.localhost#Conventional_use
See also: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/.test
The latter article lists foreign-language TLDs which serve the same purpose.
Some proposals are described here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/.home
From the article:
> So I built local.vibe — a friendly dashboard and local .vibe hostname for every local web app on your Mac. No more localhost:3000 vs localhost:5173 roulette.
> The whole thing communicates over a Unix socket acting as a reverse proxy. No external services, no accounts, no telemetry.
We’re discussing a tool that is designed for – and is only capable of – routing traffic to localhost. It’s perfectly reasonable to point out that there’s an easier solution for this use case.