HyperTexting App Turns the Open Web Into a Scrollable Social Feed

A newly launched iOS app called HyperTexting is reimagining how people browse the open web by transforming it into a scrollable social feed reminiscent of Facebook or X. The app also aims to simplify personal website updates, making them as effortless as sending a text message.

This algorithm-free vision for the internet’s future comes from Caleb Hailey, a 20-year tech veteran who recalls the early days of the web when everyone owned their own domain and shared content on their personal corner of the internet. That ideal faded as social media took over.

“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 online connections and conversations, social media also established familiar user interface norms: scrollable feeds, user profiles, and buttons for following, liking, and commenting. HyperTexting applies these same concepts to the broader web. Users can follow people, their websites, news outlets, blogs, newsletters, and more with a single click. Then they can scroll through articles, essays, and multimedia posts in a format that feels like a modern social media feed.

Hailey was motivated to build HyperTexting after watching Twitter lose its way over the years. “[Twitter] used to be a good place to discover things and share things, before they were chasing growth, and no longer reverse chron,” he said, referencing the shift to an algorithmic timeline that replaced reverse chronological order. He also noted that “links got deranked” on Twitter, making the platform worse.

During the COVID era, the concept of “doom scrolling” emerged, and Hailey found social media began to negatively affect his mood. “I basically uninstalled all the social apps from my phone,” he said, turning instead to an old RSS news reader app, NetNewsWire, to keep up with news and information online. Around that time, he also started a passion project: a static website generator built for iPhone to make posting to the web easier.

“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.

This realization led to HyperTexting, an app that uses RSS under the hood but doesn’t emphasize the protocol in its marketing. It also provides 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 remains a foundational open protocol for the web, powering WordPress blogs and podcast feeds. While adding RSS feeds to apps like NetNewsWire or Feedly offers a superior way to follow website updates , especially for journalists and researchers , it hasn’t caught on with everyday users. Most people prefer a scrollable feed, the kind used by social media platforms. Attempts to bring RSS readers to mainstream audiences have largely failed, with Google shutting down Google Reader in 2013 and no other tools achieving widespread adoption since.

HyperTexting lets users explore and follow websites, read articles without ads, and listen to podcasts. It also allows users to add their own website, such as a WordPress blog, Ghost newsletter, or a site built with open source static site generators like Hugo or HyperTexting’s own product, HyperTemplates. This means users can participate in conversations by posting on their own website instead of a centralized social media platform. Their posts link back to the original website or article and appear in the feeds of those following the same site.

The app includes an “Explore” section that highlights trending content across the web, reminiscent of Nuzzel, which once surfaced popular Twitter discussions. An optional Safari extension lets users add new websites to follow on HyperTexting while browsing.

“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. Like, let’s just use that.”

HyperTexting is available as a free download on iOS from Hailey’s Herd Works. Future plans may include premium subscriptions for extra features or a single sponsored post per day to generate revenue and sustain the app.