[crazygringo]

People learn what to do with RSS the same as with anything else. They look it up or someone tells them. It's not like a .psd file tells you what it is, if you don't have Photoshop installed.

I don't think you need to worry about "alienating" non-RSS users. If somebody clicks on an RSS link without knowing what RSS is and sees gibberish, that's not really on you. They can just look it up. Or if you want, you can put a little question-mark icon next to the RSS link if you want to educate people. But mostly, for feeds and social media links, people just ignore the icons/acronyms they don't recognize.