You want Nordic nRF24L01+ radios. That can be trivially handled by an 8bit micro using SPI, modules with these cost peanuts. However, if you want a PC/phone connectivity you would have to build your own dongle - or reprogram one from a wireless mouse/keyboard. Many use these chips.

Another option is ANT+ - that is very low power but also very low bandwidth (8 byte long messages 4x a second ...) protocol used mostly by fitness gear like training bikes, treadmills and such. Many smartphones have radios that are able to use it. Again something that is easy to make work even with an 8bit micro.

For more advanced stuff there is Zigbee, but that is quite a bit more complex (but still manageable even by an 8bit MCU) and there are some licensing issues which kept it rather obscure.

Another radio question: what about having long distance radio communication between 2 devices or more? Any project around it?

Local radio text chat could also be fun... Think of an IRC channel, only for the people who can grab the signal...

It sounds like you'd be interested to get into ham radio. There are plenty of digital modes, and you can communicate all the way around the Earth in the right atmospheric conditions using a big enough antenna, or even bounce signals off the Moon.

There are videos of HAM guys scanning randomly through the spectrum to find people. I remember one video, 80% of it was static, and then a blip.. the guy (somewhere in the US) started to poke around that freq. another blip.. then a voice. It was a Russia dude answering, it was surreal.

APRS is something like that, popular with hams.

for just 'text' maybe something like LoRaWAN[1]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LPWAN#LoRa

Oh yeah that nordic chip sounds familiar.

ANT+ could be enough for a control path or maybe keyboard.

I always wanted to try zigbee but it felt too much like a closed world, although people seemed very satisfied with it it seems.

Isn't zwave an option for more complex networks?