Found this:

https://dev.to/nickytonline/do-you-have-a-uses-page-5b82

and

https://dev.to/nikoheikkila/show-your-own-uses-page-160j

and

https://github.com/wesbos/awesome-uses

and

https://heyfirst.co/blog/lets-share-your-setup-in-uses-page/

Not a lot of history that I see at first blush, but I didn't look terribly hard. FWIW, Google "uses page" turns up a few other results as well.

i thought this was some kind of API where you could share your uses tags in a standardized way like other distributed social features so that other sites can aggregate them and show them like uses.tech does.

but this is just a static site that will accumulate a lot of stale data once people lose interest to maintain their entries.

it would not be so hard. a uses.txt on your website listing tag and description.

and a curated list of urls to all these uses.txt files that are periodically scanned for updates.

I'm pretty sure it originates with wes bos (wesbos.com) , the person that also created uses.tech

You may also be interested in the /now convention:

https://sive.rs/now3

https://nownownow.com

this is cool (person/now, person/uses); it's like a standard reporting API for people

Same here. I know people have posted about their setups but didn't know `/uses` was a thing.