The Guide
The Guide - contents The Storyus Guide

Reading

For everyone - whatever your role

Arriving Your front page Who sees what Ways to read Views & bookmarks

Creating

For members, admins and owners

Getting started Photos & media Journeys Streams Moments Postcards Video Essays Reflections Albums Timelines Magazines Publishing & reach

Admin

For owners and admins

People & roles Collective setup Housekeeping

Junior Mode

For guardians and their young storytellers

The idea Being a guardian What your child sees

Junior Mode · chapter 3 of 3

What your child sees

The junior home and the lens: what Junior Mode shows, simplifies and refuses.

The moment you hand the device over, Storyus becomes their place. A banner stripes the bottom of every page - "Junior Mode - Sam is using Storyus" - so nobody ever mistakes whose hands the device is in, and the home page greets them by name with one question: what would you like to do today?

storyus.life/@home  ·  in Junior Mode
The junior home: Hello Sam, a Make something row of large friendly tiles, the child's own stories, a From your family shelf, and the yellow Junior Mode banner with the PIN hand-back control
The junior home: big friendly making, their own shelf, and the family's stories.

What they can make

The making suite is real - the same composers adults use, simplified. Moments, postcards in every layout, essays, reflections, join-the-dots timelines, and posts on the family stream. Everything they make carries their byline from the very first moment, and they can only ever edit their own work.

What's simplified: the publish-level picker is gone. A junior post is shared with the collective (the default - the point is telling the family) or private, and nothing wider. Journeys are left out of the suite - maps of a child's whereabouts are an adult's call - and so is video. A guardian can still make any story form attributed to the child from their own adult session.

What they can read - and what they can't

Junior Mode reads like the family archive, through a member's eyes: the collectives where they are a junior author, and only those. The lens is strict in both directions:

In the lens: their collectives' stories at member level, the stream, browse, story pages, and their own shelf of work.
Outside it: private stories (even their own "just for me" pieces resurface only for guardians), drafts, anything a guardian flagged hide from Junior Mode, every other collective, settings, admin pages, invitations and export.

Handing back is the reverse of handing over: the banner's hand back control asks for the guardian PIN, and the device is an adult's again. Until then, the mode holds - closing the browser or wandering to another page doesn't shake it loose.

That's the whole shape: a real byline, real tools, a real audience of the people who love them - and not one step further. (The idea explains why it's built this way.)