HyperTexting turns the open web into a scrollable feed

HyperTexting, a new iOS app, aims to make browsing the open web as easy as scrolling a social media feed like Facebook or X, while also letting users update their own personal website as simply as sending a text message. The app was built by Caleb Hailey, a 20-year tech veteran who set out to recapture the internet’s early promise — an era when people owned their own domains and published on their own slice of the web, before social media platforms centralized that activity.

On HyperTexting, users can follow people, websites, news outlets, blogs, and newsletters, then scroll through their articles, essays, and multimedia posts in a feed modeled on social media’s now-familiar interface, including profiles and buttons for following, liking, and commenting. The app also lets users add their own website, such as a WordPress blog, a Ghost newsletter, or a site built with an open-source static-site generator like Hugo or HyperTexting’s own HyperTemplates, so they can post to it directly instead of a centralized platform; those posts then surface in the feeds of people following that site.

Hailey said he was motivated in part by watching Twitter shift away from a reverse-chronological timeline toward an algorithmic one that deranked links, and by his own experience with “doom scrolling” during the COVID era, which led him to delete social apps from his phone and return to the RSS reader NetNewsWire. HyperTexting runs on RSS — the open protocol that already powers products like WordPress blogs and podcast feeds — without promoting the protocol itself in its marketing. Past efforts to bring RSS readers to mainstream audiences have struggled: Google shut down Google Reader in 2013, and no similar tool has gone mainstream since.

“My opinion is that the greatest decentralized social network ever created already exists, and it’s called the World Wide Web,” Hailey said. Beyond following and posting, HyperTexting includes an ad-free article reader, podcast playback, an “Explore” section that surfaces trending content across the web, and an optional Safari extension for adding new sites while browsing. The app, built by Hailey’s company Herd Works, is a free download on iOS; over time, it may add premium subscriptions or a single sponsored post per day to generate revenue.

Why it matters

HyperTexting is a bet that a mainstream audience will adopt RSS-based reading if it’s wrapped in a familiar social-feed interface — a format previous RSS-mainstreaming efforts, including Google Reader, failed to achieve.