A new app called Hypertexts makes it as easy to navigate the web as it is to scroll through a social media feed like Facebook or X. The app, newly available for iOS, also aims to make updating your 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 their own little part of the wider web. This, of course, changed with the advent of social media.
“Somewhere along the way, social media came along and it was easier to make a page and post on your page than it was a website,” Haley explained in a recent interview. “And the rest is history.”
Beyond centralizing access to personal connections and conversations happening online, the shift to social media also established rules for a consumer app’s user interface, including a scrollable feed, user profiles, and other elements such as follow, like, and comment buttons.
These concepts are the basis for HyperTexting, which is built to make most of the web available in the same format. In the app, users can follow people and their websites, news outlets, blogs, newsletters and more with one click. Users can then scroll through their articles, essays, and multimedia posts in what looks a lot like a modern social media feed.
Hailey was inspired to create HyperTexting after seeing Twitter lose its way over the years, she said.
“[Twitter] it was a good place to discover things and share things, before they were chasing growth, and not reverse time period anymore,” Hailey told TechCrunch, referring to how the main Twitter timeline is now algorithmic, rather than showing things in reverse chronological order. In addition, he adds, “links were classified” on Twitter, which it was other change which made the app worse than before.
Then, during the COVID era, the concept of “doom scrolling” came up and Hailey found that social media was starting to make him feel bad for the world.
“I basically uninstalled all the social networking apps from my phone,” Hailey said, noting that he found his way back to an old RSS news reader app, NetNewsWire, as a way to keep up with the flow of news and information online. Around the same time, he started working on another passion project – a way to make it easier to publish on the web through a static website builder built for the iPhone.
“But then I started to realize that all these different things that I was passionate about could potentially be packaged into something that looked and felt really familiar to more people, and [could] solve this problem I’ve had for so long about RSS — like, why aren’t more people interested in it?” Hayley said.
This led to HyperTexting, an application that leverages RSS under the hood but doesn’t promote the protocol in marketing, while also providing a way to easily post to your own website.
“It’s trying to combine that publishing and recording experience, and really, it’s almost like a spectator to the conversation that’s already happening on the open web,” Haley noted.
RSS, for context, is an open protocol that’s still very much part of the web’s foundation, powering products like WordPress blogs and podcast feeds.
While adding your own list of RSS feeds to an app like NetNewsWire or Feedly is arguably a better way to keep track of website updates — especially for those who spend much of their day reading, like journalists or researchers — it’s not the format that everyday web users gravitate toward. Most prefer a scrollable feed – the kind used by social media sites.
Over the years, attempts to drive mainstream consumers to RSS readers have failed. Google shut down its own app in this space in 2013, Google Reader, and no other tool has gone mainstream since.
Except be able to explore and follow websites and their content, read ad-free articles and listen to podcasts, HyperTexting allows users to add their own website, such as a WordPress blog, Ghost newsletter, or other website built with open source static website generators such as Hugo or HyperTexting’s own product, Super Standards.
That way, if a user wants to join the conversation, they can post on their own site instead of a central social media platform. The post is then linked to the original site or article and will appear in the feed for those who follow the same site.
The app also includes an “Explore” section that directs users to popular content on the web. (For those who remember, this looks like a rudimentary version of Nuzzel, which once appeared what people were talking about on Twitter.)
An optional Safari extension also allows users to add new sites to follow in HyperTexting as they browse the web.
“My experience in technology over the last 20 years is that things have gotten so complex. And to some extent, there’s this urge—this overwhelming urge—to reinvent the wheel. Part of my experiment with HyperTexting is like, what if we didn’t?” Haley thought.
“Instead of chasing the platforms — the few sites that we call social media today — and instead of trying to claim some point in this decentralized federated social network that’s happening right now, my opinion is that the largest decentralized social network ever created already exists and it’s called the World Wide Web,” he said. “Well, let’s use it.”
The app, built by Hailey’s Herd Worksis a free download on ios. Over time, it may add premium memberships for additional features or include a single sponsored post per day to generate additional revenue to keep it afloat.
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