Stories are photographs and videos that sit above the chat list and disappear after a day, unless you choose to keep them on your profile. Who sees one is decided per story rather than once.
That per-story audience control is the part worth understanding, because it is the difference between this being useful and it being another place to be careless.
What you will be able to do
- check_circle Post a story and choose exactly who can see it.
- check_circle Keep one on your profile or let it expire.
- check_circle See who viewed it and what that tells you.
- check_circle Hide other people's from the top of your list.
The audience is chosen on the posting screen, one story at a time.
amp_stories The audience is a per-post decision
Each story can go to everybody, to your contacts, to your contacts except a list of people, or only to a list you pick. That last one is the interesting setting: a story for four people is a perfectly reasonable thing to post, and it is not how most platforms work.
Choose it before posting rather than afterwards, because the story is live the moment it goes up. The audience can be edited after the fact, but anybody who has already seen it has already seen it.
By default a story is gone after a day. You can also keep one on your profile, where it stays until removed — which turns the feature from something ephemeral into a small permanent gallery, and deserves a different level of care about what goes in it.
Four decisions
Three are yours as the poster and one is yours as a reader.
rule Four audiences
bookmark A day, or indefinitely
visibility Who looked
visibility_off Turning the row down
Choose the audience before posting, and treat a kept story as a profile page rather than a moment.
settings Posting one
- Set up your exclusion list once In the story privacy settings.
- Compose the story Photograph or video, with text or stickers if you want them.
- Choose the audience on the posting screen Before sending, not after.
- Decide whether to keep it Profile stories are judged differently.
- Read the viewer list lightly It says who looked, nothing more.
- Hide the prolific posters If the row at the top is tiring.
This page is a personal story. The curriculum step is the same feature used by a channel: stories as a publishing format, what boosts unlock, and how a community's stories differ from an individual's.
At a glance
- 1Post a story
Choose everyone, contacts, close friends or selected people.
- 2Keep or expire
Keep it on your profile or let it disappear.
- 3Viewers
The viewer list is reciprocal and easy to over-read.
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