About Lyefl
What it is for, and who it is for.
The name is a sentence
Lyefl is an acronym: L·Y·E·F·L, for “Live Your Every F*cking Life.”
It was coined for a photographer, a storyteller, a writer, an artist, a musician — or an ordinary person who just wants to be more truthful about the journey they are actually on. That last one is the point, not the footnote. You do not have to be good at anything, or call yourself anything, to have a life worth writing down.
It is not an instruction to live loudly. It is an instruction to live the one you have got, on purpose, and to keep some record of it while it is happening.
Slowing down is the feature
Nearly everything else you open is built to be fast. The day gets flattened into something postable, the reward arrives within seconds of posting it, and by the evening there is nothing left of either. It works. That is the problem — it works well enough that months go by and you cannot say where they went.
Lyefl is built the other way round. The page waits. It asks you to pay attention to the day you actually had and to say what it meant, in your own words, at whatever length the day deserves — three lines or three thousand.
There is no feed here. No likes counting up while you read, no streak to protect, nothing arriving that you did not go looking for. Nothing to keep up with — which is also what makes it safe to take a week over one page, or to leave it a month and come back.
What a page holds
An entry is a dated page. It holds what happened and what you made of it. It can hold a photograph too, and often will — a picture is a good reason to stop and look properly at something — but the photograph is the occasion for the writing, never the point of it. A page with no picture is a whole page.
Pages that belong together become a series, and a series read from the first page to the last is a stretch of a life, in order. That is the thing worth having, and it is the thing you cannot get by posting.
Your pages are yours. You choose, page by page, whether anyone else sees one, and a page you keep to yourself is a first-class page rather than a draft of a public one.
What we ask of each other
Two things. Be truthful — writing that flatters its author is not worth keeping, and a page written for an audience stops being a record and becomes a performance. And be kind: people are only truthful somewhere it is safe to be, so what is said here about someone else’s life is held to that.
Anything cruel, or aimed at a person rather than at a page, does not belong here. You can report or block someone from their profile, and reports are read.
Who makes it
Lyefl is made by one person — Jeffrey Marvin Forones — and it did not start out as this. It began as a tool for pulling colour palettes out of photographs, which turned out not to be the interesting part. What kept mattering was having somewhere to put the picture and the thought that came with it. So the tool became a place to write, and the colour stayed on as an ornament the page wears rather than the reason for it.
If something is broken, or you want to say something about the app, write to me. I read it.