[tiffanyh]

Example.com

People should just use example.com, it’s reserved and the most obvious to the end user that it’s for example purposes.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Example.com

[zamadatix]

Example.com is certainly acceptable as well but it does have a somewhat negative side effect of being an actual running, pinging, sometimes-service-responding host which means if people paste the documentation verbatim it may either actual execute or take longer than normal to timeout (ssh would fall into the latter). ".example" is reserved for the same purpose but does not have any registered domains, on top of being a few characters shorter for when you need more than 1 name in your documentation.

[digging]

Doesn't work if you need to refer to more than one domain.

.example is also reserved for this exact purpose.

[layer8]

It does work when you use subdomains. And there’s also example.org and example.net.

[digging]

> It does work when you use subdomains.

That's true but most people don't understand what subdomains are, so we're back to being (more) difficult for laypersons.

> And there’s also example.org and example.net

Well, that's a good point. There are options.

[layer8]

I think in the context of SSH, use of subdomains is very common and to be expected.

As far as laypersons are concerned, I would worry that they wouldn’t recognize foo.example to be a domain name, as opposed to www.example.com or blog.example.com.

[digging]

I forgot we were talking about SSH :)

But in your example, you're comparing different structures. "www.foo.example" is somewhat more clear.

[layer8]

Well, it was you who didn’t want to use subdomains. And with subdomains, we can just stick with sub.example.com/net/org.