HyperTexting's new app aims to make the open web feel more like social media by turning websites, blogs, newsletters, and podcasts into a scrollable feed, while also making it easi…

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.