A new app called HyperTexting makes surfing the web as easy as scrolling through social media feeds like Facebook or X. This app, new for iOS, also aims to make updating one’s personal website as simple as sending a text message.
This algorithm-free vision of the future of the web was built by Caleb Hailey, a 20-year tech veteran who still remembers the early promise of the Internet, where everyone would own their own domain and publish content to a small part of the wider web. Of course, things changed with the advent of social media.
“At some point, social media came along and it was easier to create a page and post to a page than it was to have a website,” Hailey explained in a recent interview. “And the rest is history.”
In addition to centralizing access to personal connections and conversations taking place online, the shift to social media has established standards for the user interface of consumer apps, including scrollable feeds, user profiles, and other elements such as follow, like, and comment buttons.
These concepts form the basis of HyperTexting, which is built to make most of the web usable in the same format. The app allows users to follow people and their websites, news outlets, blogs, newsletters, and more with one click. Users can then scroll through posts filled with articles, essays, and multimedia that feel much like a modern social media feed.
Hailey said she was inspired to build HyperTexting after seeing Twitter lose its way over the years.
“Before (Twitter) started chasing growth, it was a great place to discover and share things,” Hailey told TechCrunch, noting how the main Twitter timeline is now algorithm-based instead of displaying it in reverse chronological order. Plus, he added on Twitter, “link rankings have been lowered,” which was another change that made the app worse than before.
Then, in the age of COVID, the concept of ‘doomscrolling’ emerged, and Hailey found that social media was starting to make her feel bad about the world.
“I basically removed all the social apps from my phone,” Hailey said, adding that she went back to her old RSS news reader app, NetNewsWire, to keep up with the flow of news and information online. Around the same time, he took on another passion project: making publishing to the web easier with a static website generator built for the iPhone.
“But then I started to realize that all these different things I was passionate about could potentially be packaged into something that looked and felt really familiar to more people, and that it could solve problems that had been bothering me for a long time about RSS, like why aren’t more people paying attention to this?” Haley said.
This led to HyperTexting, an app that leverages RSS internally but provides an easy way to publish to your own website without promoting the protocol in your marketing.
“We’re trying to combine the publishing and subscription experience, and it’s really almost like an audience to the discourse that’s already happening on the open web,” Hailey said.
RSS is an open protocol that in context is still part of the web foundation and supports products such as WordPress blogs and podcast feeds.
While adding your own RSS feed list to an app like NetNewsWire or Feedly is certainly a better way to track website updates (especially for people who spend a lot of their day reading, like journalists or researchers), it’s not the preferred format for everyday web users. Most people prefer the scrollable feeds that social media sites use.
Over the years, attempts to get mainstream consumers to become RSS readers have failed. Google shut down its own app, Google Reader, in this space in 2013, and since then no other tool has made it into the mainstream.
In addition to being able to browse and follow websites and content, read articles and listen to podcasts without ads, HyperTexting allows users to add their own websites, such as WordPress blogs, Ghost newsletters, or other sites built with open source static site generators like Hugo or HyperTexting’s own product, HyperTemplates.
This way, if users want to join the conversation, they can post to their own website instead of a centralized social media platform. The post is then linked to the original website or article and appears in the feeds of people who follow the same site.
The app also includes an ‘Explore’ section that points users to popular content from across the web. (For those who remember, this is like a rudimentary version of Nuzzel, which once surfaced what people were talking about on Twitter.)
An optional Safari extension also lets you add new websites that will follow HyperTexting as users browse the web.
“My experience in technology over the last 20 years is that things have become so complex, and to some extent there is an impulse – an irresistible impulse – to reinvent the wheel. Some of my experiments with HyperTexting have been ‘What if we didn’t?'” Hayley thought.
“Instead of chasing platforms, the handful of websites that we call social media today, and instead of trying to assert some opinion about the decentralized federated social networking that’s happening right now, I think the greatest decentralized social network ever created already exists, and it’s called the World Wide Web,” he said. “Let’s just use it.”
The app, created by Hailey’s Herd Works, is available for free download on iOS. Over time, you can keep it going by adding premium subscriptions for additional features or including a single sponsored post per day to generate additional revenue.
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