There are a couple I have in mind. Like many techies, I am a huge fan of RSS for content distribution and XMPP for federated communication.

The really niche one I like is S-expressions as a data format and configuration in place of json, yaml, toml, etc.

I am a big fan of Plaintext formats, although I wish markdown had a few more features like tables.

        • SirEDCaLot
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          2 months ago

          (This is not an insult, I just had a realization that I think might affect you)-- do you know what the name comes from?

          Years ago there was a thing called a beeper before everyone had cell phones. It was a one way paging system-- you’d give your friends your beeper number, they’d call it, type in their phone number, and their number (or whatever they dialed in) would appear on your beeper. You’d then use a landline phone to call them back (early versions of the system had no text or reply capability, only numbers and only one-way).

          I always thought it was a cool name. But thinking about it I realize someone less than maybe 25-30 years old might literally have never encountered such a device. Much like a 5.25" floppy disk or rotary dial phone, they went out of style years ago and a young person might never have encountered one.

          Curious if that’s you?

          • Feathercrown@lemmy.world
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            2 months ago

            You know, I probably should have looked into this… yeah, this is me lol. I’ve seen floppies and we had an old rotary phone, but I’ve never heard of a beeper. It still sounds weird but at least there’s a reason.

            • SirEDCaLot
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              2 months ago

              It’s all good. Like I said, no insult at all. There’s no reason why you would ever have encountered a beeper, it’s one of those things that once SMS came around everybody just collectively decided to move on from. Unlike floppies or rotary phones there wasn’t some continued use for it.