It’s also second only to .com in terms of query volume in ICANN’s Magnitude statistics with 980 mil vs .internal’s 60 mil. Not sure if that makes it a de facto standard, but it’s close.

I went with .home and so far the problems are within reason

I switched from .local to .honk and I’m never looking back.

I was using .local, but it ran into too many conflicts with an mDNS service I host and vice versa. I switched to .lan, but I’m certainly not going to switch to .internal unless another conflict surfaces.

I’ve also developed a host-monitoring solution that uses mDNS, so I’m not about to break my own software. 😅