Scroll. Scroll. Scroll. It’s what we do.
HyperTexting makes the open web feel exactly like a social media feed. iOS users can pick it up now. It turns surfing the web into thumb-jogging on a timeline. Think Facebook. Think X. But actually open.
The creator? Caleb Hailey. Twenty years in tech. He remembers when having your own domain mattered. Before everyone abandoned their personal corners for rented platforms.
“Social media came,” Hailey says. “It was easier to just post.”
That shift changed everything. It centralized our attention. It built UI habits we can’t shake. Feeds. Likes. Follow buttons. We expect them.
HyperTexting builds on that muscle memory. You follow sites. You follow blogs. News outlets. Newsletters. It feels familiar. Comforting, even. But under the hood, it’s RSS. Just hidden.
Why build this?
Hailey watched Twitter rot. It lost its chronology. Links got buried. The algorithm ate discovery.
“[Twitter] was good at sharing things,” he told TechCrunch. “Then they chased growth.”
He hated the doom scrolling too. The endless negative loop during the pandemic made him uninstall everything. He went back to NetNewsWire. An RSS reader. Boring? Maybe. But it worked.
He started tinkering. A static site generator for iPhone. Easy publishing.
Then it clicked.
“What if we package this familiar feel and solve the problem of why no one cares about RSS?”
Hailey didn’t promote RSS in marketing. He just built a viewer. For the discourse already happening. The web is already decentralized. Why fight it?
RSS powers WordPress. Podcasts. Blogs. It’s old tech. Solid. But mainstream? Never. Google killed Reader in 2013. Nobody picked up the slack. People want the scroll. Not a list of feeds to manage manually.
HyperTexting gives them the scroll. With options.
You can read ads-free. Listen to podcasts. Add your own site. WordPress, Ghost, Hugo, or HyperTemplates. Write there. Link it. It shows up in the feeds of people following you. No centralized server holds your content. You own the slice.
There’s an Explore section. Trends from across the web. Feels like old Nuzzel. A Safari extension helps you add sites while browsing. Simple.
Hailey hates reinvention. The kind that breaks things for style points.
“Tech got complicated,” he mused. “We have this irresistible urge to reinvent the wheel.”
He stopped chasing federated social networks. Stop chasing the platforms. The greatest network is already here. It’s the web itself.
Just use it.
Maybe it won’t change everything. But it feels cleaner.
