An RSS feed is a publication that you can subscribe to without needing to give any personal information, such as your email address.

Website would publish their blog entries to an RSS feed so you didn’t need to keep going to their website, or give your email address to get it sent to you that way.

RSS stands for Really Simple Syndication.

Lots of websites (news, blogs, etc) have an "RSS" page which is automatically updated every time they make a new post. People have RSS apps, which scan all the RSS pages they're subscribed to, and can quickly in one place see all the new posts they're interested in.

Me personally, I have an RSS app that tells me anytime Winehq, This Week in KDE, and Frame.work make a new post

As mentioned, RSS is used by RSS readers to keep tabs on constantly updating content.

Typically this would be something like: today’s sports/business stories, every single weather watch issued by the National Weather Service, or the last 10 blog posts on Daring Fireball.

Like most XML-based formats from the early 2000’s, it’s complex, excessively verbose, and hard to read as a human (hello CDATA) but it’s good enough for computers.

What killed it was Google killing off the most popular reader (Google Reader). They did this mostly because people wouldn’t go to the destination websites… which is bad for their pagview metrics.

Ultimately Facebook came along and put everything behind their wall, where no RSS feeds are available.

I'll add the important bit, that it's this icon:

If you see this icon, click it. If you have a program/app that can read the feed, it will open and you'll see what it does.

Even Lemmy communities have their own RSS feeds, tho it's limited to last 10 or 50? Idk, posts.

Since others answered already I’ll just add that if you’re on iOS or macOS I highly recommend https://netnewswire.com/ for an RSS reader. It’s a fantastic, free and open source app. It doesn’t require an account or third party server to use for your feeds.

RSS, is a fantastic thing, which makes it very easy to keep track of updates, news, blog posts, etc..... for hundreds of things at the same time.... in an easily consumable method.

IMO-

Feedly, is one of the better PAID apps.

FreshRSS is a great self-hosted alternative. This is what I use.

It stands for “Really Simple Syndication”, but you don’t need to know or care about that part.

The part that matters is that you get news from places you trust without the algorithm BS. RSS lets you subscribe to any website you want, and you see all of their new posts, in reverse chronological order, no algorithm. You can (if you have a good reader) filter out subjects you’re not interested in, and just see the stuff you care about.

I recommend trying out Feedly (feedly.com) with a few sites you already follow, and going from there.

It stands for Real Simple Syndicate. It's just an XML file that allows people of other websites to propagate indo provided by another.

Others already explained what is is, I'll just add that it used to be a popular way of getting news, articles etc. from many sources in one place/app before Facebook happen and everyone moved to subscribing "fanpages".

In addition to blogs, RSS is used by podcasts. If you use an app like Spotify, you’re not using RSS, but rather their internal API, which tracks how much of the show you listened to, etc. If you use an RSS based app (overcast is my favorite), you’re often going to be subscribing via an RSS feed.

For podcasting, RSS has advantages and disadvantages. The upside is that it’s about as private as possible. You do show up on someone’s radar when you download episodes, but your podcast player isn’t sending detailed information that can identify you or your listening habits. The disadvantage is mainly for podcasters publishing on RSS: it’s very hard to tell how many listeners you have, and how active they are.

Already answered in other comments. I just wanted to add a couple of related communities:

• !rss@lemmy.ml
• !rssfeeds@lemmy.world

I feel like I missed this part of internet school.

Edit: thank you everyone!

Like federation but you can't interact with the posts.

I’ve been loving RSS for awhile now not only because it’s private but because it seems to be unpaywalled as well? Maybe someone can answer this, but how is it I can subscribe to the NYT RSS feed and can get completely free articles to my reader?

PS shoutout to NetNewsWire on iOS which is open source and the developer seems like a great guy. It’s not great for discovery as you have to paste in the web url manually, but if you already know what you want to read it’s a great RSS reader app.