Worlds, Stories & Tags

Life isn't linear, and your memory shouldn't be either. Worlds, stories, and tags are the three ways you give shape to what you write — and Ember never connects anything for you. You decide what belongs together.

Worlds

A world is a life context — Work, Family, Personal, College, the friend from a train platform in 2022. People live in one or more worlds, each colour-coded so the graph and pages stay readable at a glance.

Worlds also configure how relationships fade. Each world has a decay threshold — the stretch of quiet after which someone in it starts to feel out of touch. A person can override it, and if someone lives in several worlds, Ember resolves the threshold using the rule you choose (least strict, most strict, or a custom value). See Feed, Nudge & the Graph for how fading works.

Screenshot: the Worlds screen with colour-coded contexts
Each world is a colour and a rhythm of contact.

Stories

A story is a narrative you weave from entries across time — the climbing seasons, a launch sprint, Diwali at home. A single story can hold many chapters and several people, spanning years.

  • Continue a story from the editor by typing & and its name, or create one with the command palette.
  • Add a cover photo to give the story a face on its page.
  • Stories are always something you build deliberately — Ember never groups entries into a story on its own.
Screenshot: a story with multiple chapters across years
Fourteen chapters, three people, one thread.

Tags

Tags are lightweight labels for themes that cut across people and worlds — #gratitude, #travel, #health. Add them inline while writing with #, then open any tag to see every entry that carries it. Jump to all tags with ⌘8.

Which one should I use?

  • Reach for a world when it's about who and the rhythm of contact — a group of people you tend together.
  • Reach for a story when it's about a thread through time — connected moments you want to read as one arc.
  • Reach for a tag when it's about a theme — a feeling or subject that recurs anywhere.
There's no wrong answer, and nothing is permanent. Worlds, stories, and tags are yours to rename, re-group, or remove whenever the shape of your life changes.