A new app<\/a> called HyperTexting<\/a> 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.<\/p>\n 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\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n \u201cSomewhere along the way, social media came, and it was easier to make a page and post to your page than it was a website,\u201d Hailey explained in a recent interview. \u201cAnd the rest is history.\u201d<\/p>\n 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\u2019s user interface, including a scrollable feed, user profiles, and other elements, like buttons for following, liking, and commenting.<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n Hailey was inspired to build HyperTexting after seeing Twitter lose its way over the years, he said.<\/p>\n \u201c[Twitter] used to be a good place to discover things and share things, before they were chasing growth, and no longer reverse chron,\u201d 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, \u201clinks got deranked\u201d on Twitter, which was<\/a> another<\/a> change<\/a> that made the app worse than before.<\/p>\n Then, during the COVID era, the concept of \u201cdoom scrolling\u201d emerged, and Hailey found that social media was beginning to make him feel badly about the world. <\/p>\n \u201cI basically uninstalled all the social apps from my phone,\u201d 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 \u2014 a way to make it easier to post to the web via a static website generator built for iPhone.<\/p>\n \u201cBut 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 \u2014 like, why don\u2019t more people care about this?\u201d Hailey said.<\/p>\n That led to HyperTexting, an app that leverages RSS under the hood but doesn\u2019t promote the protocol in its marketing, while also providing a way to easily post to your own website.<\/p>\n \u201cIt\u2019s trying to combine that publishing and subscribing experience, and really, it\u2019s almost like a viewer to the discourse that already happens in the open web,\u201d Hailey noted.<\/p>\n RSS, for context, is an open protocol that is still very much a part of the web\u2019s underpinning, powering products like WordPress blogs and podcast feeds.<\/p>\n While adding your own list of RSS feeds to an app like NetNewsWire or Feedly is arguably a better way to follow website updates \u2014 especially for those who spend a lot of their day reading, like journalists or researchers \u2014 it\u2019s not the format that everyday web users have gravitated to. Most prefer a scrollable feed \u2014 the kind that social media sites use.<\/p>\n 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<\/a>, Google Reader, and no other tools have gone mainstream since.<\/p>\n In addition to being able to explore and follow websites<\/a> and their content, read articles without ads, and listen to podcasts, HyperTexting lets users add their own website, like a WordPress blog, Ghost newsletter, or other site built with open source static site generators like Hugo<\/a> or HyperTexting\u2019s own product, HyperTemplates<\/a>.<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n The app also includes an \u201cExplore\u201d section that points users to trending content across the web. (For those who remember it, this is like a rudimentary version of Nuzzel<\/a>, which once surfaced <\/a>what people were talking about on Twitter.)<\/p>\n An optional Safari extension also lets users add new websites to follow on HyperTexting as they browse the web.<\/p>\n \u201cMy experience in tech over the last 20 years is that things have just gotten so complicated. And to some degree, there\u2019s this urge \u2014 this irresistible urge \u2014 to reinvent the wheel. Part of my experiment with HyperTexting is like, what if we didn\u2019t?\u201d Hailey mused.<\/p>\n \u201cInstead of chasing the platforms \u2014 the handful of websites we call social media today \u2014 and instead of trying to assert some opinion in this decentralized federated social networking thing that\u2019s happening right now, my opinion is that the greatest decentralized social network ever created already exists, and it\u2019s called the World Wide Web,\u201d he said. \u201cLike, let\u2019s just use that.\u201d<\/p>\n The app, built by Hailey\u2019s Herd Works<\/a>, is a free download on iOS<\/a>. Over time, it may add premium subscriptions for extra features or include a single sponsored post per day to generate additional revenue to keep it afloat.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n When you purchase through links in our articles, we may earn a small commission<\/a>. 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