What is this little orange thing?

The little orange thing is the icon for RSS, or "Really Simple Syndication." It's a set of standards, invented in 1999, for the purpose of aggregating content from various places online, in the simplest and most efficient way possible. Clicking it will take you to an XML document, for which you can copy and paste the link into a number of available reader programs, to automatically get new posts from websites you may visit.

You've probably seen this icon in other places- at least, if you used the internet prior to Google becoming the sole largest data giant of the world in... 2012 or so. Some places still use it, though it is often only included because there's no real reason to turn it off, and it's been around for years and years. Websites like Wikipedia still have this feature floating around for various purposes, and many news outlets include feeds you can subscribe to, as an alternative to using email. Almost every FOSS social networking application (Mastodon, Pixelfed, etc.) includes some way to follow accounts or tags with RSS as well.

Unfortunately, due largely to the rise in popularity and accessibility of email, and the opposite effect for RSS as a whole (and the expectation that RSS feeds will not include advertisements or spam, and do not have an address to sell to a data broker), most places shove email subscriptions front-and-center, while putting RSS feeds in the far reaches of their sites. For anyone who's familiar with it however, it's a great tool for collecting posts from sites you like, all in one place.

Or, for creators, it's a great and simple-to-set-up technology to help get their content out to people who want to see it. At least in theory. In practice, it's basically inaccessible to anyone who can't pay for a webhost and a domain, or host their own website, doesn't know how to use WordPress or write code, or can't just pay someone else to set it up for them.

Cool, how do I use it?

This differs from client to client, though typically the process is as follows:

- Download and install a client from the internet or your device's app store (For example, QuiteRSS. If their site is down, they also host the program on Github. Don't pay money for anything, RSS is an open standard.)

- Add a new feed

- That's it! Now you can read new posts to your heart's content.

Most RSS readers (like QuiteRSS) also download and store offline copies of all the posts you read by default, so anything important to you, you can come back to later, even if the original post or site is taken down. There's a lot more to it if you want to get very specific and technical, but for the majority of people, that's really all they will ever need to know. It's like email without an account.