A new app, HyperTexting, turns the open web into a scrollable social media-like feed

There’s a new app called HyperTexting that makes it as easy to surf 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 created by Caleb Haley, a 20-year-old technologist who still remembers the early promise of the Internet, where everyone would own their own domain and publish content to a small slice of the broader web. Naturally, that changed with the arrival of social media.

“Somewhere along the way, social media came along, and it was easier to create a page and post it on your page than it was to create a website,” Hayley explained in a recent interview. “The rest is history.”

Beyond centralizing access to personal communications and online conversations, the shift to social media has also created standards in the consumer application user interface, including a scrollable feed, user profiles, and other elements, such as follow, like, and comment buttons.

These concepts form the basis of hypertext, which is designed to make the majority of the Web available in the same format. Through the app, users can follow people, their websites, news outlets, blogs, newsletters and more with one click. Users can then scroll through their multimedia-filled articles, articles, and posts in what looks much like a modern-day social media feed.

He said Healy was inspired to build HyperTexting after seeing Twitter lose its way over the years.

“[Twitter] “It was a good place to discover and share things, before they chased growth, and it no longer reflects chronology,” Healey told TechCrunch, referring to the way Twitter’s main timeline is now algorithmic, rather than displaying things in reverse chronological order. Additionally, he adds, Twitter has “changed the order of links,” another change that makes the app worse than before.

Then, during the coronavirus era, the concept of “death scrolling” emerged, and Healy found that social media was starting to make him feel bad about the world.

“I basically uninstalled all the social media apps from my phone,” Healey said, noting that he found his way back to the 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 publishing on the web easier via a static website builder designed for the iPhone.

“But then I started to realize that all these different things that I was passionate about could be brought together into something that would feel really familiar to more people, and [could] Solving this problem that has bothered me for a long time about RSS — like, why aren’t more people interested in this?’” Healey said.

This gave rise to HyperTexting, an application that takes advantage of RSS under the hood but doesn’t promote the protocol in its marketing, while also providing a way to easily publish to your own website.

“It’s trying to combine the publishing and subscription experience, and it’s really like a viewer of the discourse that’s actually happening on the open web,” Healey noted.

RSS, for context, is an open protocol that is still a large part of underpinning the web, powering products like WordPress blogs and podcast feeds.

While adding your RSS feed list to an app like NetNewsWire or Feedly is a better way to keep up with 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 to. Most prefer a scrollable feed, the type used by social media sites.

Over the years, attempts to push everyday consumers into RSS readers have failed. Google shut down its own app in this space in 2013, Google Reader, and no other tools have gone mainstream since then.

In addition to the ability to explore and follow websites and their content, read articles without ads, and listen to podcasts, HyperTexting allows users to add their own website, such as a WordPress blog, a Ghost newsletter, or any other site built using open source static site generators like Hugo or HyperTexting’s own product, HyperTemplates.

This way, if a user wants to join the conversation, they can post to their website instead of the central social media platform. The post will then be linked to the original website or article and will appear in the feed of those who follow the same site.

The app also includes an “Explore” section that directs users to trending content across the web. (For those who remember, this is like a primitive version of Nuzzel, which once popped up what people were talking about on Twitter.)

The optional Safari extension also lets users add new websites to follow on HyperTexting as they browse the web.

“My experience in technology over the last 20 years is that things have become very complex. To some extent, there is this desire — this irresistible desire — to reinvent the wheel. Part of my experience with HyperTexting is, what if we don’t do it?” Hailey mused.

“Instead of chasing platforms — the handful of websites we call social media today — and instead of trying to assert some opinion about what’s happening now in decentralized federated social networks, my opinion is that the greatest decentralized social network ever created already exists, and it’s called the World Wide Web.” “Like, let’s just use that.”

The app, created by Hailey’s Herd Works, is a free download on iOS. Over time, you may add premium subscriptions for additional features or include one sponsored post per day to generate additional revenue to keep it afloat.