A new app called HyperTexting makes browsing the web as easy as scrolling through social networks, like Facebook or X. The app, recently available for iOS, also aims to make updating your 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 early promise of the Internet, where everyone would own their own domain and publish content to their small slice of the web. That, of course, changed with the advent of social media.

“At some point social media came along and it was easier to create a page and post on it than 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 standards for a consumer app’s user interface, including a scrollable feed, user profiles, and other elements such as follow, like, and comment buttons.

Those concepts form the basis of HyperTexting, which was created to make most of the web available in this same format. In the app, users can follow people and their websites, media outlets, blogs, newsletters, and more with one click. Users can then scroll through your articles, essays, and multimedia posts in what looks a lot like a modern social media feed.

Hailey was inspired to create HyperTexting after seeing Twitter lose its way over the years, she said.

“[Twitter] “It used to be a good place to discover things and share things, before they chased growth, and they weren’t reversing cron anymore,” Hailey told TechCrunch, referring to the way Twitter’s main timeline is now algorithmic, rather than showing things in reverse chronological order. Additionally, he adds, “links were declassified” on Twitter, which was another change that made the app worse than before.

Then, during the COVID era, the concept of “fatal scrolling” arose and Hailey found that social media was starting to make her feel bad about the world.

“I basically uninstalled all the social apps on my phone,” Hailey said, noting that she found her 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 publishing on the web easier through a static website generator built for the iPhone.

“But then I started realizing that all of these different things that I was passionate about could potentially be packaged into something that looks and feels really familiar to more people, and [could] solve that problem that has bothered me for so long regarding RSS, like, why don’t more people care about this? Hailey said.

That led to HyperTexting, an application that leverages RSS internally but doesn’t promote the protocol in its marketing, while also providing a way to easily publish to your own website.

“It’s about combining that publish and subscribe experience and really, it’s almost like a spectator to the discourse that’s already happening on the open web,” Hailey said.

RSS, to put it in context, is an open protocol that remains a fundamental part of the web, powering products like WordPress blogs and podcast feeds.

While adding your own list of RSS feeds to an application like NetNewsWire or Feedly is arguably a better way to follow website updates, especially for those who spend much of their day reading, such as journalists or researchers, it is not the format that everyday web users have gravitated toward. Most prefer a scrolling feed, the type used by social media sites.

Over the years, attempts to attract mainstream consumers to RSS readers have failed. Google shut down its own app in this space in 2013, Google Reader, and no other tool has gone mainstream since.

In addition to being able to browse and follow websites and their content, read ad-free articles, and listen to podcasts, HyperTexting allows users to add their own website, such as a WordPress blog, a Ghost newsletter, or another site built with open source static site generators like Hugo or HyperTexting’s own product, HyperTemplates.

That way, if a user wants to join the conversation, they can post to their own website instead of a centralized social media platform. The post is then linked to the original website or article and will appear in the feed of those who follow that same site.

The app also includes an “Explore” section that directs users to trending content on the web. (For those who remember, this is like a rudimentary version of Nuzzel, who once revealed what people were talking about on Twitter.)

An optional Safari extension also allows users to add new websites to follow in HyperTexting while browsing the web.

“My experience in technology over the last 20 years is that things have become very complicated. And to some extent, there is this impulse, this irresistible impulse, to reinvent the wheel. Part of my experiment with hypertext is: what if we didn’t do that?” Hailey mused.

“Instead of going after the platforms (the handful of websites we call social media today) and instead of trying to assert some opinion on this decentralized, federated social media thing that’s happening right now, my opinion is that the largest decentralized social network ever created already exists, and it’s called the World Wide Web,” he said. “Like, let’s use that.”

The app, created by Hailey’s Herd Works, is free to download on iOS. Over time, you can add premium subscriptions for additional features or include a single sponsored post per day to generate additional income and keep you afloat.