The Guide - contents
The Storyus GuideCreating
For members, admins and owners
Getting started Photos & media Journeys Streams Moments Postcards Video Essays Reflections Albums Timelines Magazines Publishing & reachReading · chapter 2 of 4
Who sees what
The privacy ladder from the reader's side - and why some stories are invisible to you.
Storyus makes one promise above all the others: nothing here is public unless someone deliberately makes it so. The machinery behind that promise is simple enough to hold in your head, and once you have it, everything you see (and don't see) makes sense.
Every story carries one privacy level, chosen by its author. From most open to most closed: public (the whole internet), guest, outer circle, inner circle, collective (every member), and private (the author, alone). Your role is a rung on the same ladder - and you see everything at your rung and below.
Your rung on the ladder
| If your role is… | You can read stories marked |
|---|---|
| Just visiting (no account) | public |
| Guest | guest, public |
| Outer circle | outer circle, guest, public |
| Inner circle | inner circle, outer circle, guest, public |
| Member, admin, owner | collective - and everything below |
Private sits outside the ladder entirely: a private story is visible to its author and to no one else - not even the owner of the collective. Your drafts and half-thoughts are genuinely yours.
Seeing it work
Here is the same Browse page in +demos twice - once as a member, once signed out. Same archive, two rungs of the ladder: the member sees 19 stories, the visitor 15. The others aren't locked, greyed out or teasing you with a padlock - they're simply absent. On Storyus, what you can't see doesn't exist for you.
Why it's built this way
Families aren't flat. There are things for everyone at the reunion, things for the household, and things for one person's own remembering. The ladder lets a single archive hold all of it without anyone having to run separate accounts or side-channels - the author chooses once, and the archive quietly shows each person their own true version of it.
When you're ready to publish your own, the same ladder is yours to use as an author - that's covered in Publishing & reach.
Try it now
Open Browse in +demos and note the story count under the intro card. Sign out, look again, and watch the archive politely shrink.