Community Stories

Stories are short, ephemeral photos or screen recordings that show up at the top of /communityand disappear after 24 hours. Use them to share what you're working on, recap a project, or showcase a flow without committing to a full forum post.

Capture

Photo

Press the shutter and we grab a single frame from the screen, window, or tab you picked in the share dialog.

Video

Record up to 60 seconds with optional microphone and system/tab audio. A 3-2-1 countdown with audio cues plays before recording starts.

Top-nav recorder

Open the recorder from any page — the labeled Record button next to Help opens a menu for record-a-story / record-an-image / take-screenshot / post-this-page. While a recording is running the same button morphs into a live Recordingpill so you always know what state you're in.

Pause / resume

The floating recorder pill is draggable and now carries Pause, Resume, Stop, and Cancel. Recordings survive page navigation.

Audio mixing

Toggle Microphone and System audio independently before you start. Both tracks mix into the final WebM.

The browser's screen-share dialog runs the show - pick a single tab for the cleanest demos, or your whole desktop if you want to walk through multiple apps. Tab audio only works when you tick "Share audio" in that dialog.

Edit

After capture, drop emoji, text, or GIF stickers anywhere on the preview. Drag, scroll-to-resize, rotate, duplicate, or layer them with the floating toolbar. Captions support up to 280 characters.

For video, the editor includes a dual-handle trim slider over a frame strip, a mute toggle, and a playback-speed chip (0.5x / 1x / 1.5x / 2x). The trimmed range becomes the published duration.

Photo stories show for 5 seconds in the viewer; video stories play for their (trimmed) duration.

Background music

Open the Musicaction on the editor's right rail to add a generated soundtrack. Theo Score writes a fresh instrumental track tailored to your brief — no royalty-free library to dig through.

Presets

Pick from Ambient, Cinematic, Upbeat, Lo-fi, Dramatic, Playful, or Minimal. Each preset is tuned to sit cleanly under voice and system audio.

Custom brief

Need something specific? Switch to Custom and write a short prompt (up to 600 characters). Theo Score will generate an original track for it.

Volume + ducking

The slider sets the playback volume (default 60%). Video stories automatically duck the music to ~40% so dialogue stays intelligible.

Preview & replace

Listen to the clip inline, then re-generate or remove it if it's not quite right. The mute button on the viewer toggles your story's audio and the music together.

Music is optional and uses the same AI credits as the Music node on the Video Creator Canvas. Stories show a small music badge on their thumbnail so authors can see at a glance which posts have a soundtrack.

Audience (two independent axes)

Personal

World
Visible to anyone on OpenCharts — even logged-out visitors browsing /community.
Followers
Only people who follow you can see it (Instagram-style one-way follow).
Off
Skip the personal strip entirely — useful if you only want your team to see it.

Team

Whole team
Visible to every member of the selected organization.
Specific channel
Only members of that channel will see it.
Off
Skip the team strip entirely.

A single capture can hit both axes. Publish to your followers andyour team's #design channel in one shot — Stories was built around this. The Publish button stays disabled until at least one destination is active.

Lifecycle

Every story has a 24-hour TTL. After that it soft-deletes and the media file is purged from storage by an hourly cron sweep. Story views are deduped per user, so re-opening a story doesn't inflate its view count.

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