Wednesday, March 25th – HyperTexing, 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!
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
"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.
Publish and subscribe
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.
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.
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.
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