A new app called HyperTexting is making 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 own personal website as simple as sending a text message.
This algorithm-free vision for the future of the web was built by Caleb Hailey, a 20-year tech veteran who still remembers the internet’s early promise, where everyone would own their own domain and publish content on their small slice of the wider web. That, of course, changed with the arrival of social media.
“Somewhere along the way, social media came, and it was easier to make a page and post to your page than it was a website,” Hailey explained in a recent interview. “And the rest is history.”
Beyond centralizing access to the personal connections and conversations that take place online, the shift to social media also established norms in a consumer app’s user interface, including a scrollable feed, user profiles, and other elements, like buttons for following, liking, and commenting.
Those concepts form the basis for HyperTexting, which has been built to make the majority of the web available in this same format. On the app, users can follow people and their websites, news outlets, blogs, newsletters, and more with a click. Users can then scroll through their articles, essays, and multimedia-filled posts in what feels very much like a modern-day social media feed.
Hailey was inspired to build HyperTexting after seeing Twitter lose its way over the years, he said.
“[Twitter] used to be a good place to discover things and share things, before they were chasing growth, and no longer reverse chron,” Hailey told TechCrunch, referring to the way the main Twitter timeline is now algorithmic, instead of displaying things in reverse chronological order. Plus, he adds, “links got deranked” on Twitter, which was another change that made the app worse than before.
Then, during the COVID era, the concept of “doom scrolling” emerged, and Hailey found that social media was beginning to make him feel badly about the world.
“I basically uninstalled all the social 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 began working on another passion project — a way to make it easier to post to the web via a static website generator built for iPhone.
“But then I started to realize that all these different things that I was passionate about could potentially be packaged up into something that looks and feels really familiar to more people, and [could] solve that problem that has bothered me for so long about RSS — like, why don’t more people care about this?” Hailey said.
That led to HyperTexting, an app that leverages RSS under the hood but doesn’t promote the protocol in its marketing, while also providing a way to easily post to your own website.
“It’s trying to combine that publishing and subscribing experience, and really, it’s almost like a viewer to the discourse that already happens in the open web,” Hailey noted.
RSS, for context, is an open protocol that is still very much a part of the web’s underpinning, 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 follow website updates — especially for those who spend a lot of their day reading, like journalists or researchers — it’s not the format that everyday web users have gravitated to. Most prefer a scrollable feed — the kind that social media sites use.
Over the years, attempts to drive mainstream consumers to RSS readers have fallen short. Google shut down its own app in this space in 2013, Google Reader, and no other tools have gone mainstream since.
That way, if a user wants to join in the conversation, they can post on their own website instead of a centralized social media platform. The post is then linked to the original website or article, and will be surfaced in the feed for those following that same site.
The app also includes an “Explore” section that points users to trending content across the web. (For those who remember it, this is like a rudimentary version of Nuzzel, which once surfaced what people were talking about on Twitter.)
An optional Safari extension also lets users add new websites to follow on HyperTexting as they browse the web.
“My experience in tech over the last 20 years is that things have just gotten so complicated. And to some degree, there’s this urge — this irresistible urge to reinvent the wheel. Part of my experiment with hypertexting is like: what if we didn’t?,” Hailey mused.
“Instead of chasing the platforms — the handful of websites we call social media today — and instead of trying to assert some opinion in this decentralized federated social networking thing that’s happening right now, my opinion is that the greatest decentralized social network ever created already exists, and it’s called the World Wide Web,” he said. “Like, let’s just use that.”
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