HyperTexting

A Fortnight of TestFlights: What's New in HyperTexting

2026-04-08T13:00:00-07:00

Wednesday, April 8th – The HyperTexting public TestFlight is underway (join here), and we're on track to go live in the App Store later this month (pre-order here).

Thank you to everyone who has submitted feedback. You have told us what you like and you've asked hard questions. More than anything else you have confirmed that we are on the right track, and you've helped us refine our vision. We've added several new features, including three that we're excited about: an all-new "swipe-to-preview" gesture, a new unified Discover experience, and Profiles.

Continue reading to learn more, or join the TestFlight to see what's new. Version 0.22.0 is already the fifth minor release in the last two weeks, and it's available today.

First contact. It's not just for astronauts on fictional missions to outer space.¹ It is also an excellent description of the moment when an idea finally gets put to the test. 👩🏻‍🔬 We aren't doing a lap around the moon (!), but we did launch something out into the real world.

We've spent over a year designing and building HyperTexting. Up until last month the only people who had seen or used the app were hand-picked from a pool of family and friends. It's a very different thing to onboard new users whose only context is a tweet or a blog post. Would our ideas resonate? Could we continue moving forward, or did we need to go back to the drawing board?

The app was not done, and it still isn't, but we needed to start collecting feedback. So we kicked off a public TestFlight, and we waited. Then we got the first notification: someone submitted feedback using the TestFlight app.² A few people commented on a Reddit post. Someone else sent us an email. Then several people emailed us. Some even joined the @hypertexting.community. And every bit of feedback helped!

What's new? 🆕

Before we show you the complete list of new features, let's take a look at how things are shaping up with a few video demos. 🍿 There are too many changes to cover them all, so we'll just focus on our three favorite improvements:

A new swipe-to-preview gesture
The unified Discover experience
Profiles!

Unified discovery

One of the improvements we're most excited about is the new unified Discover experience. It turns out you don't need a complex algorithm to discover new feeds that you might actually like!

Swipe-to-preview

One of our favorite things about the internet is the endless supply of creativity. Websites don't all look the same. This is a good thing! But it also means that not all website feeds are created equal. HyperTexting TestFlight users wanted an easier way to "peek" at a feed to see if it was worth following instead of doing the follow, then skim, then unfollow dance. After three or four prototypes we landed on a gesture that feels even better than it looks: swipe left to preview. 👀

Profiles!

Our mission for HyperTexting is to combine "subscribing" together with "publishing" in a single package. A news feed and a way to post on your website as easily as you might send a text message. Our north star is to make creating a real website from scratch as easy as signing up for a social media account and picking a username. We still have some work to do before we get there, but we're getting very close to making it easy to update existing websites. The first step is to add your existing websites to HyperTexting using the brand new Profiles feature.

We hope you enjoyed this progress report on HyperTexting. If you did, please consider clicking the pre-order button to get notified when we go live in the App Store. And if you want to try HyperTexting today, please join the public TestFlight. Thanks again to everyone who has submitted feedback! We'll see you in the next update. ✌️

Changelog

Here's what we've shipped over the last two weeks:

NEW user website Profiles. Add your website(s) to HyperTexting!
NEW unified Discovery experience combines search with "Suggested For You" feeds.
NEW Activity experience shows various "feediverse" activities, starting with feed discovery.
NEW in-app browser for viewing links without leaving the app.
NEW "Add profile" wizard guides users through adding a profile.
Added a Settings shortcut to the Timeline toolbar.
Added in-app Safari extension setup guidance and notification controls to Discover.
Added pull-to-refresh support to the Discover and Activity views.
Added support for marking discovery activities as done from the Activity view.
Added support for context menu actions for suggested feeds, including "Suggest Less".
Added support for previewing feeds – swipe left to preview! 🤌🏽
Added unfollow confirmation; tapping "Following" on Profile now asks for confirmation.
Added support for searching feed titles, descriptions, and URLs from the Following screen.
Added support for YouTube feed descriptions & thumbnails (video playback coming soon).
Improved feed discovery notifications to only notify for net-new discoveries.
Fixed the Profile screen "Follow" button (it actually works now).
Removed the "Safari Extension Guide" from the Activity tab (moved to Settings).
Dozens of smaller "papercuts" fixed.

Real astronauts don't expect to interact with extraterrestrials, but they do go on very real missions around the moon and back. 🚀 🌔 ↩︎
We do not collect any user data from HyperTexting. The app processes 100% of its data on-device. The only way for us to learn what users think is if they tell us. And they did! And they are liking it! ↩︎

HyperTexting isn't just for text

2026-03-27T10:00:00-07:00

You might be wondering why HyperTexting has hitched its proverbial branding wagon to "text" in a world dominated by video platforms like YouTube, Instagram, and TikTok. Are HyperTexting news feeds just an endless wall of text? No! Here's what it looks like to scroll your timeline using HyperTexting.

Pretty cool, right? 😎

We don't think of HyperTexting as a first-class podcast app because there are already plenty of amazing apps that are focused 100% on podcasting (h/t @overcast.fm 🐐). However, feeds containing audio and video posts are first-class citizens in HyperTexting. You shouldn't see a post about a new episode from that podcast you follow in your timeline, and then have to switch over to your podcast app to start listening. 🙅🏻‍♀️ Just tap on the audio or video and start listening. This is the HyperTexting way. 👌

What about videos?

You can keep browsing your timeline and listen while media plays in the background, or watch videos using picture-in-picture while you continue to scroll.

Why "HyperTexting"?

It should come as no surprise that HyperTexting was heavily influenced by the underlying technologies that make the internet tick. In fact, you have to look back even further than the invention of the world wide web to find the origin of the term "hypertext". The word hypertext was coined by Ted Nelson in 1963, and published in 1965. Nelson also invented the term "hypermedia". By the time Tim Berners-Lee wrote the original 1989 thesis that led to the November 1990 proposal for the world wide web, hypertext was recommended as "a way to link and access information". Even in 1989, Berners-Lee recognized the potential of hypertext when he said "I will use the word 'Hypermedia' to indicate that one is not bound to text."

In the early days of the web, beginning with the first "website" ever created, most of the information being linked to was text. Today hypertext is more relevant than ever before because hyperlinks are more relevant than ever before, thanks to the endless stream of hypermedia that we can link to. The web is quite literally a series of hypertext documents, laid out using the hypertext markup language, delivering rich hypermedia over the hypertext transfer protocol.

The web is all hypertext all the way down 🕳️

When you type h-t-t-p or h-t-t-p-s in Safari or Chrome – for example, to visit https://www.google.com – you are invoking the HyperText Transfer Protocol, or HTTP (Wikipedia). Even when you use the YouTube, Instagram, or TikTok apps instead of visiting their websites, they utilize the HyperText Transfer Protocol behind the scenes to download videos and other content (e.g. see TikTok's "HTTP-based APIs").

When you visit the @youtube.com, @instagram.com, or @tiktok.com websites, you are not only using the HyperText Transfer Protocol, you are also viewing hypertext documents. A hypertext document is created using the HyperText Markup Language, or HTML (Wikipedia). These days most websites omit the .html extension in their links, but you will still periodically find websites with URLs like this:
https://example.com/support.html
If you didn't know, now you know! 👨🏽‍🏫

We also love the name HyperTexting because it calls to mind something that over 5 billion people do every day: send "text" messages. It started as plain text, but if your messages look anything like mine, they are full of links, images, audio, video, and more. Texting is easy. And making it easy to @makehypertext.com is the mission statement that inspired us to create HyperTexting. 📱

Hypertext is the thing that makes the internet magical. Texting is something almost every human does every day. Put them together and that's how HyperTexting got its name.

Hypertext + texting = HyperTexting ✨

If you enjoyed this preview, you'll like HyperTexting even more when it's your feed minus the ads, algorithms, and AI-generated slop. 🤌🏽

📱 Pre-order on the App Store →
👩🏻‍🔬 Download on TestFlight →
💬 Join the HyperTexting Community →

Introducing HyperTexting

2026-03-25T07:00:00-07:00

Wednesday, March 25th – HyperTexting, the destination news feed, is now available to download on TestFlight, or pre-order on the App Store.

HyperTexting for iPhone will be available to download from the App Store in April 2026, with iPad and Mac support arriving later this year. Join the public TestFlight to try HyperTexting today, and join the @hypertexting.community to share your feedback and help us to help you escape the algorithm.

Finally, we would love it if you could help us spread the word about HyperTexting with some limited-edition merch, available now through Monday March 31st, 2026 on @cottonbureau.com!

The HyperTexting timeline, responses, profile pages, and media.

In September 2026 the Facebook News Feed will turn twenty years old. 🤯 What started out as a way to keep up with family and friends has evolved into a tool for staying up-to-date with almost any topic in the world. Today most people get some or all of their news from social media.¹

But there's a problem. Less than half of the content in our timelines is from feeds we follow. First it was the ads, then the algorithms, and now the AI generated slop. The "for you" feed feels less and less personal with each passing day. This trend has been going on for so long that we're running out of pejoratives to describe how they make us feel bad.

FOMO. Doom scrolling. Algorithm awareness, nay algorithmic anxiety. And now "digital casinos", with all of the harms that term suggests. Engineered addiction is literally on trial, and no one is surprised.

A better news feed

Allow us to let you in on a little secret. Facebook did not invent the news feed in 2006. The original technologies behind modern internet feeds were invented in the 1990's. Those same technologies have been quietly growing in popularity ever since. Today hundreds of millions of websites offer feeds, as often indicated by the subtle icon. In fact, most websites offer feeds using the exact same technology that powers podcasts – you follow or subscribe using a compatible app and get new content as soon as it is posted. A New York Times feed contains headlines and links to articles on @nytimes.com. A podcast feed contains "show notes" and links to MP3 audio files.

"Wherever you get your [~~podcasts~~ feeds]" is a radical statement because it describes an internet that is not controlled by a handful of big tech companies. It's an internet where creators "have ownership over their work and their relationship with their audience" – Anil Dash.

That's our first goal with HyperTexting – to make finding & following website feeds as easy as podcasting. We want to take back the timeline. We believe the "for you" page should actually work for you, not the platform.

The moment you experience your timeline full of posts from the feeds you follow, and nothing more – no ads, algorithms, or AI-generated slop – something clicks. We hope HyperTexting will help you spend less time scrolling your social media timeline. But you might still want to have an online presence. A place where you can share things. That's why we've built HyperTexting from the ground up as a tool for publishing and subscribing to feeds. It's a feed reader and writer.

The HyperTemplates Composer opens in content mode (middle). Swipe left for content types, and swipe right to add attachments.

Making it easier to post online is exactly how we got stuck with these social media platforms in the first place. Right when it seemed inevitable that every human would eventually have a website, MySpace came along and made it easier to create a web page (myspace.com/tom) than a web site, and the rest is history. There was no need to purchase a domain – just pick a username and start posting! Fast forward twenty years and we're paying the price. It's easier than ever to create a website, and yet still not as easy as settling for social media. Reversing that trend is the north star for HyperTexting.

Our mission statement is: it should be easier to post on your website than to post on social media. Or more simply, our mission is to @makehypertext.com. That's why we built our own website generator, @hypertemplates.net. And that's why we're building it into HyperTexting, alongside support for updating @wordpress.org, @ghost.org, and @gohugo.io websites.

Limited edition @makehypertext.com merch, for your <body>! Available now on @cottonbureau.com

The public TestFlight that begins today is open to anyone who wants to help us improve HyperTexting's subscriber experience. In a few weeks we'll start sending out invites for a private Composer TestFlight to help us test the publishing experience. To join the Composer TestFlight waitlist, please visit the @hypertexting.community and like or comment on this post.

Thank you!

If you've managed to make it this far, thank you for reading! We hope we've inspired you to escape the algorithm. Please Pre-order HyperTexting on the App Store today. Or, if you just can't wait to get started, please join the public TestFlight, or join the community to get into the private Composer TestFlight waitlist.

✌️

https://pewresearch.org/journalism/fact-sheet/social-media-and-news-fact-sheet/ ↩︎

Welcome to the Feediverse 🚀

2026-03-04T08:00:00-08:00

Today we're excited to announce three great products:

A destination news feed for text, audio, video, and hyperlinks
A privacy-preserving content discovery & personalization engine
A publishing system that makes updating your website as easy as sending a text message

A news feed, a discovery engine, and a publishing system. News feed, discovery, publishing. Are you getting it? These are not three separate products. They are one product, and we're calling it HyperTexting.¹

The HyperTexting timeline, responses, profile pages, and media.

What is a "destination" news feed? To explain how we, uh, arrived at this description please follow along as I compare the human experience on the world wide web to traveling. Or skip to the conclusion where I explain how to escape the algorithm. 🤖 Or join the public TestFlight that kicks off next week! 🚀

The Destination Internet

Traveling is one of the greatest joys in life. Regardless what type of travelers we are, there's nothing quite like going to the places and seeing the things. Many of the most memorable travel experiences don't start upon arrival at our destination though. Most great journeys begin with a discovery. A photograph or a video of something we want to experience for ourselves. The anticipation makes the arrival that much sweeter.

These same joys can be found in every form of mass media ever invented. From learning about distant ideas in books (text), to hearing distant sounds and voices over the radio (audio), to seeing distant places on the television (video), to meeting distant people on the internet (hypermedia). The destination is the content, the journey begins with discovery, and the best discoveries happen by "word of mouth" from someone we trust.

When you look at the internet through the lens of content as the destination, and word of mouth as a discovery engine, it's no wonder that social media platforms – and influencers – play such a significant role in our lives. What started as tools to follow our friends (circa MySpace and early-Facebook) eventually expanded into tools for keeping up with our interests (think Twitter, #hashtags, and TikTok). The destination was the text, audio, and video content, and the discovery engine was human-powered. People we follow sharing content we are interested in.

Unfortunately, just like many once-great tourist attractions, social media platforms have slowly evolved into an unpleasant tourist trap. First it was the advertising, then the algorithms, and now the artificial intelligence. But there is good news. Escape is not only possible, it's also extremely rewarding. In the same way that experienced travelers discover that the most memorable destinations are just off of the beaten path, there is so much more to the world wide web than the handful of websites we call social media.

The internet is all feeds, all the way down

On September 5th, 2026 the Facebook news feed will turn 20 years old. Twenty! 🤯 That launch marked a seminal moment in internet culture history as it shaped much of how we experience the internet down to this day. It's all feeds, all the way down.

What is a feed? A feed is a page that contains a regularly updated stream of content. Your BFFs Instagram page is a feed, but so is the home page of the @nytimes.com. The primary way we consume feeds is in a "timeline" – a feed of feeds containing updates from all of the feeds we follow. Or at least it used to be. These days less than half of the content in our timelines is from feeds we follow. The platforms decided that we weren't spending enough time in their apps – and thus not viewing enough ads – so they filled our timelines with algorithmically recommended content that we never asked for. If we want to see updates from the feeds we follow we have to scroll past more ads, click bait, and AI-generated slop.

Or do you?

The Facebook news feed did a great job of getting grandmas everywhere onto the world wide web, but it did not invent the feed in 2006. The original internet feed was invented in the 1990's, and the underlying technologies that enabled those feeds has been quietly growing in popularity ever since. Today hundreds of millions of websites offer feeds, as often indicated by the subtle icon, and the exact same technology also powers podcasts. An ESPN feed contains sports headlines and links to articles on @espn.com. A podcast feed contains "show notes" and links to MP3 audio files.

You can follow the same podcasts in Apple Podcast as you can in Spotify or your favorite podcast app on the App Store because the podcast can't be controlled by any one company – it's controlled by the creators.² That you can no longer follow Twitter feeds after you decide to leave Twitter isn't a technical limitation – it's part of the tourist trap. That's also why "Wherever you get your podcasts" is a radical statement.

Escaping the algorithm

HyperTexting is everything we love about traveling on the open social internet – the human-recommended discovery, and the destination content – wrapped up in a familiar package. HyperTexting is not a new social media platform 🙅🏽‍♂️ but it is designed to look and feel like one.

Timeline

Your timeline, minus the ads, algorithms, and AI slop. It's like the "for you" feed, but it actually works for you and not the platforms.

Your text, audio, and video timeline – complete with integrated playback controls and picture-in-picture.

Explore

Explore trending topics for you with Hot Hyperlinks, browse followed feeds, and use the Feed Finder to discover new voices. The HyperTexting personalization features surface content that is relevant to your interests, because it comes from feeds you trust.

Explore trending hyperlinks, browse & filter followed feeds, and discover new voices.

Our commitment to user privacy 🔒

Personalization shouldn't require an invasion of your privacy. That's why we took our time to build Hot Hyperlinks & trending topics experiences that are processed 100% on-device. It turns out that you don't need to boil the ocean to surface the top 100 most linked web pages from the feeds you follow.

Profiles

Feeds are automatically grouped together into rich profiles where you can browse an aggregated website timeline, or view text-, audio-, video-, and link- attachments, and more.

Explore updates from the feeds you follow via rich profile pages.

Oh, and there's one more thing...

It should be easier to update your website than it is to post on social media. This was the original inspiration behind HyperTexting, and it's why we started by building our own website generator³ from the ground up called @hypertemplates.net. It's also why we will be adding support for @ghost.org, @wordpress.com, and @gohugo.io websites during an invite-only Composer TestFlight.

The HyperTemplates Composer opens in content mode (middle). Swipe left for content types, and swipe right to add attachments.

The Composer TestFlight

The HyperTemplates public TestFlight will be focused on timeline, explore, and activity feeds. This initial public beta is a "read-only" version of HyperTexting, but our north star is to build a "read-write" client for the open social web. If you are interested in helping us test the composer, please join the @hypertexting.community and follow this topic.

The first Composer TestFlight release will unlock support for the HyperTexting CMS, powered by @hypertemplates.net. We're also working on support for posting to @wordpress.com, @ghost.org, and @gohugo.io websites. We anticipate rolling these integrations out this spring.

If you already have a Wordpress, Ghost, or Hugo website and are interested in helping us test the Composer, please join the @hypertexting.community to help us design something awesome. If you have a website that is not using one of these tools, and you're in the market for a new static site generator, please give @hypertemplates.net a try and let us know what you think!

Stay tuned

That's all we have to share for now, but there's even more to HyperTexting than just these highlights. We hope you'll give it a try, and join the @hypertexting.community to share your feedback and help us improve the app.

Please know that this Steve Jobs bit was fully tongue-in-cheek. I have always wanted to do this, but it also happened to be the ~~laziest~~ easiest way to announce what we've been working on for the past year. ↩︎
This is a big part of the reason why even small podcasts can get paid. The same is historically not true for a modest social media following because the platform is in control, not the creator. ↩︎
Is it a bad idea for a startup to apply the Tim Cook doctrine? Maybe. But "We [genuinely] believe that we need to own and control the primary technologies behind the products we make". Do we regret the path we took to get here? Absolutely not. ↩︎

Pre-orders

2026-03-03T12:00:00-08:00

Thanks for your interest in HyperTexting! 🙏

Pre-orders for the FREE HyperTexting app are coming soon, pending App Store review.

...any day now...

This page will automatically redirect to the pre-order page as soon as it goes live.

Check back soon, or join the @hypertexting.community below to get notified as soon as pre-orders become available. 🚀

Thoughts on Hashtags

2025-06-05T09:00:00-07:00

Whether you love them or hate them, #hashtags are ubiquitous.

One of the reasons hashtags became so popular is because they created a bridge from the social graph (who you know) to the interest graph (what you are interested in).

The idea for hashtags was first proposed by @chrismessina.me in a 2007 tweet. Soon after Twitter implemented hashtags, they spread like wildfire across the entire social media landscape including Instagram, Facebook, and YouTube. Within a few short years the hashtag had captured the zeitgeist enough to be crowned the American Dialect Society's 2012 word of the year. And in June 2014, hashtag was added to the Oxford English Dictionary as "a word or phrase with the symbol # in front of it, used on social media websites and apps so that you can search for all messages with the same subject".

What if, instead of reinventing the social media wheel, we brought some of social media's best ideas to regular websites?

One of the reasons hashtags became so popular is because they created a bridge from the social graph (who you know) to the interest graph (what you are interested in). Fast forward to today and a lot has changed. The hashtags role as a rudimentary interest graph has been displaced by socio-interest graphs as popularized by TikTok and its #FYP (For You Page). These and other changes have caused many to become algorithm-aware and seek out alternatives such as Bluesky and Mastodon which aim to facilitate a "decentralization" of the social internet. While these approaches offer some interesting benefits over traditional social media – including better support for hashtags – they suffer from similar problems (e.g. content moderation).

Just in case someone needs to say it out loud: a decentralized social network already exists, it's called the internet. What if, instead of reinventing the social media wheel, we brought some of social media's best ideas to regular websites? What would this look like? This is one of the ideas we want to explore with HyperTexting.

To be clear, we're not there yet. Automated tag feeds like this one and converting plain text #hashtags into customizable links are not it — but they are a start.

What we need is a hashtag service – or ideally, competing hashtag services – that websites could opt-in to sending "hashtag mentions" (think push notifications). These "hashtag mentions" could be built on top of existing standards like Webmentions, so hashtag services could offer public APIs (e.g. POST /api/hashtags/#example). They could even interoperate! If such services existed, websites could further opt-in to these interest graphs by directing their own hashtag links to the hashtag service of their choosing to promote discovery. For example, this #HTML hashtag actually links out to x.com/hashtag/HTML instead of a page that only shows the #HTML posts from this website. The hashtag services that provide clear value to their users would effectively become aggregators, and could thus benefit financially from @stratechery.com's aggregation theory.

Hashtags for the human internet

Social media isn't going anywhere anytime soon. But social media platforms are effectively just websites. They are websites with arbitrary rules that change whenever it benefits the platform, not the people. More and more people (and businesses) are feeling the effects of these changes every day, and many of them are seeking alternatives. One of those alternatives is to have your own website where you can make your own rules.

Just in case someone needs to say it out loud: a decentralized social network already exists, it's called the internet.

Our goal with HyperTexting is not only to make having and updating a website as easy as creating a social media account and posting to it – we also want to make it as interesting. We think hashtags are one piece of that puzzle.

A public hashtags service is on the roadmap for HyperTexting, but we would absolutely love it if someone would beat us to it. If you are reading this and nodding your head, please consider joining the @hypertexting.community to continue the discussion. 💬

✌️

Caleb Hailey

Founder @herd.works

June, 2025