Most diary apps treat privacy as a single switch for the whole account: everything locked, or everything visible. That is not what people who search for a way to keep some diary entries private and share others are asking for. They already write both kinds of pages — a medical note that should never leave the phone, and a trip report they would happily send to a friend — and they do not want those two decisions to collide.
Storyie's unit is the entry, not the journal. New pages start private. You publish one when you mean to. The rest stay exactly as unseen as they were.
TL;DR
- Every diary and note starts private. There is no account-wide "make my diary public" setting.
- Publishing is a toggle on that one page. Other pages do not change state.
- A public profile, tag page, and "More from this author" strip list only other public entries — private writing is never teased.
- On the free plan, public diaries do not count toward the 15-per-UTC-month private cap (50 private notes in total). Unpublishing can, if you are already at that cap.
- Shared journals (mobile) are invite-only and can never be made public. A public page is a different tool.
- A timeline day publishes as one unit: the whole day, or none of it.
The request is mixed privacy, not a public diary
"Public online diary" and "share a diary with a link" are neighboring searches. They are not this one. This query is the mix: keep some diary entries private and share others, in the same account, without a second app and without an all-or-nothing setting.
That is why a page that only explains what a public online diary is does not quite answer it, and why a page about handing someone a link is the how of one share, not the model for living with both modes. The model is simpler than either headline: private is the default, public is an explicit choice per page, and those two states coexist.
Private by default, one page at a time
New diaries and notes are stored as private unless you say otherwise — that default lives on the row, not only in the editor. The public/private control on /diary/new, /diary/[slug]/edit, and the matching note screens applies to the entry you are looking at. Flip it, and only that page becomes reachable on the web. There is no bulk publish, no "make my journal public," and publishing never walks the rest of your writing.
Guest (anonymous) sessions can write privately. They cannot publish. Signing in is required before a page can leave the private default.
Once a page is public it gets a short storyie.com/d/… (diary) or storyie.com/n/… (note) address that 308-redirects to the canonical /u/yourname/… page. Anyone with the URL can read it without an account. Signing in is only needed to like or comment. Your email address is never shown on a public page.
Unpublish, and that public page stops resolving immediately. The slug is not handed to some other entry, so republishing restores the same URL. Private writing is not left behind as a preview, a truncated excerpt, or a "see more."
What a visitor can actually see
Opening one public page shows that page, plus whatever you put on your public profile (account name, avatar, bio, location, website if you filled them in, public diary and note counts, a writing-streak badge, simple writing stats). If you have published other pages, the same view may show a "More from this author" strip of those other public entries, and a link to the public profile. The strip is queried as public-only; private pages are not in the candidate set.
The public profile at storyie.com/u/yourname is the collection of pages you chose to publish, paginated, with tag links and a month-by-month archive. It is not a window onto the private journal. Tag pages at storyie.com/tags/<tag> group public entries by topic the same way.
Search engines only pick up public entries with real substance (at least 800 characters and 150 words). A short page is still readable at its URL; it is just not submitted for indexing. That is a guardrail for thin pages, not a leak of private ones — private entries are never in the sitemap.
If you later want a shorter hostname for the collection you have already published, a Pro subdomain (yourname.storyie.com) wraps the same public pages. It does not expose private writing, and it is not required to mix private and public in the first place.
Free plan: sharing does not spend the private cap
Publishing is available on the free plan. What the free plan caps is private capacity, not the ability to share:
- 15 private diaries per UTC calendar month
- 50 private notes in total
- 1 image per entry
- 3 diary templates
- 1 shared journal you own (joining journals other people own stays unlimited)
A public diary does not count toward the monthly private-diary cap, so sharing a page you are proud of does not spend one of the 15. Notes are a lifetime private total, not a monthly one.
The catch is the reverse trip. Making a public diary private again counts it back into that month's private total. If you are already at 15 private diaries for the UTC month, Storyie refuses the unpublish until the next UTC month starts, or until you are on Pro, which has no diary or note cap. That is a quota rule, not a privacy trap: the public page stays public until the unpublish is allowed; it does not become secretly readable some other way.
Pro is the optional paid upgrade that removes those caps, raises images per entry to 10, and adds Markdown-plus-images export, a monthly writing report, and the subdomain above. This post does not quote a price; the pricing page shows the current amount.
A few people is not the same as public
If the honest audience is a partner, a parent, or a small group — not the open web — a public URL is the wrong tool, because anyone who gets the URL can open it. Shared journals, in the mobile app, are invite-only. Entries written there are forced private: they cannot be flipped public, do not appear on a public profile, and do not go into search results.
Those two modes do not replace each other. Keep a shared journal with a few people and, separately, publish a regular diary when you have a page worth putting on the open web. The free plan lets you own one shared journal; joining journals other people own is not capped that way.
Timeline days are one unit
Daily timeline entries follow the same private-by-default rule at a smaller scale, with one extra constraint: visibility belongs to the compiled day. You publish that day's moments together, or you publish none of them. A single moment inside the day cannot be public on its own.
Regular diaries and notes are the opposite unit. Each of those pages is public or private independently. That is the mix the query is named for: keep some diary entries private and share others, without the shared ones dragging the private ones along.
Takeaways
To keep some diary entries private and share others: write as you already do. Everything starts private. When one page is worth sending, toggle that page to public and copy the link. Leave the rest alone. Unpublish if you want the door closed; republish if you want the same door open again.
For the mechanics of the link itself, see share a diary online with a link. For what a public diary looks like to a stranger, see a public online diary anyone can read. For what to write in the first place, five ways to use Storyie is a good next read. To start writing, sign up in the browser, or get the app for iPhone or Android.
