"Public diary" usually means giving up on privacy altogether. Most journaling tools that let you share your writing treat the whole account as the unit: turn on sharing and everything you have ever written becomes visible, or keep everything locked away and no one ever sees a word. Neither option fits what most people actually want, which is much narrower — one entry, readable by anyone, while everything else you write stays exactly as private as it was before.
Storyie treats privacy as the default and publishing as something you do on purpose, one entry at a time. Nothing you write is ever visible to anyone else unless you explicitly say so, and saying so for one entry does not say anything about the rest of your diary.
TL;DR
- Everything you write starts private — diaries, notes, and daily timeline entries alike.
- Publishing happens entry by entry, not account-wide: publish one, and the rest stays untouched.
- A published entry gets a permanent web address plus a short link that always redirects to it.
- No account is needed to read a public entry — a link is enough.
- Only entries with real substance are listed in the sitemap for search engines; short posts stay link-only.
- Unpublish and the public address stops working immediately; the same link works again if you republish later, though on the free plan an unpublish can be blocked in a month you are already at your private-diary limit.
What people actually want from a "public diary"
The instinct behind it is rarely "I want strangers reading everything I write." It is closer to "I wrote something I am proud of, or something that might genuinely help someone else, and I want it to be findable and readable by people who are not already in my life." That is a request for one door, not for taking the walls down.
Storyie's daily timeline entries follow the same principle at a smaller scale: visibility belongs to the whole day, so you publish a full day of moments or none of it, and a single moment inside that day can never be published on its own. The same all-or-nothing-per-unit idea applies to your regular diaries and notes, except the unit there is the individual entry.
Private by default, published one entry at a time
Every diary, note, and timeline day you create in Storyie starts private. Publishing is a decision you make about one specific entry, not a global switch — you toggle that entry to public, and it alone becomes visible. Nothing else you have written changes state.
Once an entry is public, it gets a permanent address in the form storyie.com/u/yourname/diary/your-entry-title-<code>, plus a short link that uses the same slug, storyie.com/d/your-entry-title-<code>, and redirects straight to the full address. Either one works for sharing — the short link is just a shorter path to the exact same page. No one needs a Storyie account to open either link and read what you wrote.
How someone actually finds it
A link someone already has is the most direct route, but it is not the only one. Your public profile at storyie.com/u/yourname lists your public diaries and notes, paginated, with tag links and a month-by-month archive — it is your public writing as a real collection, not a scattering of one-off links. Public entries are also grouped by topic on tag pages at storyie.com/tags/<tag>, sorted by newest or most popular, so someone can land on your writing by subject rather than by already knowing you.
Public entries with real substance, roughly 800 characters and 150 words or more, are the ones listed in the site's sitemap, which is what lets search engines find them at all. A two-line entry is still publicly readable at its link — it just is not submitted to search engines, a small guardrail that keeps thin pages out of search results and keeps what does get indexed worth a reader's time.
If having a memorable address of your own matters to you specifically, rather than the storyie.com/u/yourname path, Pro subscribers can serve their public writing from a personal subdomain instead. We cover that in more detail in your personal domain.
Unpublishing keeps your link
Changed your mind about an entry that is already public? Switch it back to private and its public address stops working immediately — the page is gone to anyone who tries to open it. Storyie keeps the address reserved rather than handing it to something else, so if you decide to publish that same entry again later, the exact same link works again instead of pointing you toward a broken page or forcing you to reshare a new one.
One thing worth knowing on the free plan: public entries do not count toward your monthly private-diary limit, so switching one back to private counts it against that limit again. If you are already at 31 private diaries for the month, Storyie will refuse the unpublish until the next month starts or you upgrade — Pro has no such limit and can always unpublish. Publishing and unpublishing both work the same way whether you are using the mobile apps or the web app.
What a visitor can, and cannot, see about you
Opening one of your public entries also puts your public profile one click away, so it is worth knowing what is actually on it. Visitors can see your account name, avatar, bio, location and website if you have filled those in, when you joined, your public diary and note counts, a writing-streak badge, and simple writing stats. Likes on a public entry are visible to everyone, though a visitor needs to sign in to leave one themselves. None of that requires them to know anything else about you, and your email address is never shown on any public page, under any circumstance.
That distinction matters more than it sounds. A public entry is a door into one piece of writing and, if a reader clicks through, a profile that shows what you have chosen to make visible — never anything you have not deliberately put there.
When you want a few people, not everyone
Sometimes the honest answer is not "public" or "private," it is "a specific small group." Storyie's shared journals, available in the mobile app, are built for exactly that: an invite-only space whose entries can never be made public. They are never listed on any public profile, never grouped on a tag page, and never indexed by search engines. If what you actually want is a handful of family members or close friends reading along rather than the open web, that is the tool for it, kept deliberately separate from publishing.
It is worth being precise about the difference, because the two solve different problems. A public entry is for a piece of writing you want to be findable by people who do not yet know you. A shared journal is for people you have already chosen, who you want reading along regardless of whether the writing would hold up to a stranger. Neither one requires you to compromise on the other — you can keep a shared journal with a few people and still, separately, publish a diary entry to the open web when you have something worth putting a permanent link on.
Publish the one entry that is worth sharing
You do not have to open your whole diary to the internet to have a public online diary anyone can read. Write privately by default, and when one entry is worth putting a permanent, readable link on, publish just that one. If you want a broader sense of how people use Storyie day to day, five ways to use Storyie is a good next read. Otherwise, sign in or create an account and try publishing with your next entry.
