Welcome to the Feediverse 🚀

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.