What is this little orange thing?

That's the icon for RSS, or "Really Simple Syndication." It's a set of standards, created in 1999, for the purpose of aggregating content from various places online. Clicking it will take you to a specially formatted page, whose link you can copy and paste 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 get rid of it, and it's been around forever. Websites like Wikipedia still have this feature floating around for various purposes, and many news outlets offer feeds of their own, as an alternative email newsletters. Almost every FOSS social networking application (Mastodon, Pixelfed, etc.) has 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 effective inability of RSS feeds to inject advertisements or otherwise be monetized), 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, RSSGuard).

- Add a new feed

- Fetch content from your feeds

- That's it! Now you can read and download as much content as you care to.

Most RSS readers also download and store offline copies of all the posts you read by default, so for anything important to you, you can come back to it later, even if the original post or site is taken down. And don't pay money for RSS readers, RSS is an open standard. You're getting a seriously raw deal if you pay someone for a tool this simple.

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 that matters! It's like email without an account.