Every entry you write in Storyie starts private, with no exceptions. When you decide one is worth sharing, you don't copy it into a separate blog tool or paste it into an email — you switch that single entry from private to public, right where you wrote it, and Storyie gives it a real URL you can send to anyone.
On the web, that's a Globe/Lock button in the editor footer. In the app, there are two ways in: the lock icon on the entry opens a visibility sheet ("Who can see this diary?"); choose Public and it confirms with "Make this diary public? It will appear on your profile and may be indexed by search engines", then offers Copy Link and Share. Or you can skip straight to the share icon — on a private entry it asks first ("To share this diary, it needs to be made public"), then publishes and opens your device's share sheet in one step. Either way, the moment an entry goes public, its link exists: storyie.com/u/your-name/diary/my-first-note-a1b2c3d4. There's no waiting, no build step, no separate publishing flow.
Concretely, that's the whole sequence:
- Write the entry, privately, like any other.
- Decide it's worth sharing.
- Tap the toggle (web: Globe icon in the footer; app: lock icon on the entry, then confirm) — or tap share and let it publish for you.
- Copy the link, or use the share sheet.
Nothing else changes. The entry's still the same entry, still editable, still yours — it just now also has a public address.
Where the link comes from
The slug in that URL — my-first-note-a1b2c3d4 — is generated the instant you publish, from the first few words of the entry plus a short random id so two people's "My First Note" don't collide. An entry that has never been public has no such slug and no public URL at all; it simply doesn't exist as a web page until you publish it.
A shorter form also works: storyie.com/d/{slug} redirects to the full canonical URL. That's the version the mobile share sheet hands off when you tap share, because it's easier to paste into a message. On the web, the share row (X, Copy Link, and LINE on Japanese-language entries) hands you the /u/.../diary/... URL, and it only appears once the entry is actually public — there's nothing to share about a private one. Notes work the same way, at storyie.com/u/your-name/note/{note-slug} with a storyie.com/n/{slug} short form.
Keep some entries private, share only the ones you choose
This is the part worth being precise about: visibility is per entry, not a whole-diary setting. Nothing forces an all-or-nothing choice.
- New entries default to private. You never accidentally publish something.
- You flip visibility one entry at a time. Write ten entries, make one public, and the other nine are untouched — still only visible to you.
- There's no in-between state. An entry is either private (only you) or public (anyone with the link, and potentially findable beyond it — more on that below). There is no secret-link-only mode for entries: if an entry is readable at a URL at all, it's public, and it can turn up in the places listed further down.
In practice this looks like: keep the entries about a hard week, a messy draft, or something you're still processing entirely private, and publish the one that turned into something you'd want a friend or a stranger to read.
What "public" actually means
Be clear-eyed about this before you publish: a public entry isn't a private link that only the person you send it to will ever see. It can also surface on its own:
- Your profile page,
storyie.com/u/your-name, lists every public entry you have — one link covers everything you've chosen to share. - Recent public entries can appear in the "Latest Stories" feed on the storyie.com homepage.
- Entries show up on any tag pages they belong to, and in the sitemap.
- Every public entry gets an auto-generated preview image, so when the link is pasted into a message or social post, it unfurls properly instead of showing a bare URL.
There's no site-wide search across other people's diaries and no browse-everyone feed — discovery is limited to a profile, tags, and the homepage's recent entries, not a search box. And search-engine indexing has one more gate: an entry needs to be both public and reasonably substantial (about 800 characters or 150 words) before it's marked indexable and added to the sitemap. Publish a two-line entry and it's still live at its URL — it just won't show up in a Google search for it.
Changing your mind
Made something public and want it back? Toggle it to private again. The public page returns a real 404 immediately and the entry drops out of your profile — that page is generated fresh on every request, so the change takes effect the moment you make it. (The homepage's "Latest Stories" cards and the shared topic pages are cached briefly and catch up within about a minute.) The only wrinkle: if your account is on the free plan and already at its private-diary limit for the month, switching an entry back to private can be refused until you make room, since private entries are what count against that limit — public ones don't.
The one link that isn't a diary entry
There's a second kind of shareable link in Storyie, and it's worth not confusing with entry sharing: the monthly writing report at storyie.com/r/{token}. It's opt-in, revocable whenever you want, and marked so search engines skip it. It shows that month's writing stats and the topics you wrote about, plus one highlighted quote drawn from your writing — so it isn't purely numbers, and it isn't a way to share an entry without publishing it. If you want something readable by someone else, publishing the entry is the path.
Write on your phone or in the browser — sharing works the same either way
The web app at storyie.com is a full editor, not a companion to the phone app — you can write, edit, and publish an entry entirely in the browser, with the same Globe/Lock toggle in the footer. You can even try writing on the storyie.com landing page before you've signed up, to see what it feels like. iOS, Android, and web all read and write the same entries, so an entry you started on your phone can be published from your laptop, or the other way around.
Sharing publicly isn't a paid feature, either. A free account can publish and share as many public entries as it wants — the free plan's monthly cap (31 diaries) applies only to private ones, so publishing something doesn't use up any of that allowance. Pro removes the private-entry cap entirely and adds a few things worth knowing about if you outgrow the basics: 10 images per entry instead of 1, a full Markdown-plus-images export, and — if you want a cleaner presence than /u/your-name — your own subdomain. None of that is required just to share a link; you do need a free account, though, since an anonymous or guest session can't publish anything.
Getting started
- Sign up — it takes a minute, and it's what lets an entry actually publish.
- Write the entry, on the web or in the app.
- Read it back, edit if you want to.
- Toggle it public, then copy or share the link that appears.
- Keep writing everything else the way you always have: private, by default, until you decide otherwise.
If you're not sure where sharing fits into a daily writing habit, five ways people actually use Storyie is a good next read. If you'd rather just see what a published entry looks like before writing one, diary examples collects them by theme — those are written by Storyie's AI writing personas, not by users. Otherwise, get started or grab the app for iOS or Android — the first entry is private the moment you write it, and stays that way unless you say otherwise.
