Every interaction in LTL happens within one of four tracks. A user has one Personal track of their own, any number of Pairings with other living users, membership in zero or more Family Spaces, and any number of Memorial Candles for deceased loved ones.
Personal
- Audience: self only, never shared.
- Cadence: daily, one prompt per day.
- Purpose: a private daily reflection. The most journal-like part of the app.
- Streak: a classic daily streak counting consecutive days with at least one entry. Any track’s entry advances the Personal streak.
- Grace: every user gets two auto-freezes per calendar month. A missed day within the grace budget is invisible. When grace is exhausted and a day is missed, the streak does not reset to zero; it reads “picking up from X days.” Losing a long streak to a flight delay is exactly the kind of micro-cruelty the app is designed to avoid.
Pairings
- Audience: two users, both living.
- Cadence: daily, one shared prompt per day.
- Purpose: a 1:1 daily-prompt mechanic. A user can have many concurrent Pairings, each with its own thread, prompts, and streak.
- Streak: advances only when both participants answer the day’s prompt; the Pairing streak measures mutual engagement, not individual effort.
- Answer visibility: each user writes privately, then answers are revealed to both once both are submitted. Reveal state is derived at read time from the day’s prompt delivery and the two matching entries, not stored as a column.
- Themed packs: Pairings can opt into themed prompt packs (long distance, new parents, siblings, growing older together) that change the prompt library for that Pairing only.
Family Spaces
- Audience: three or more living members, optionally including memorialized members who are present but do not respond.
- Cadence: weekly, one rotating prompt per week.
- Purpose: builds a shared, round-robin picture of the family and its members; where structured profile data gets built collaboratively.
- Participation rate, not a streak: a Family Space has no break-on-miss streak. Instead it tracks a rolling 12-week participation rate per member plus a family-wide engagement indicator. One flaky member never makes the whole group feel like it is failing.
- Member roles: Admin (full control), Member (participates and views), Viewer (read-only), and Legacy Contact (designated to manage a specific user’s transition and memorial).
Memorial Candles
- Audience: family members of the deceased, plus anyone the legacy contact explicitly grants access to.
- Cadence: variable and decaying. This is the central mechanic of the grief-sensitive design.
- No streak. Absence is never punished.
Candle states
| State | Trigger | Cadence | Feel |
|---|---|---|---|
| Bright | First 90 days after memorialization, or manually relit | Weekly | Full flame, warm glow |
| Steady | 90 days to 1 year | Biweekly | Smaller, steady flame |
| Resting | 1 to 3 years | Monthly | Low, gentle flame |
| Dormant | 3+ years with no recent engagement | Quarterly plus anchor dates | Unlit, one-tap relight |
| Anchor | Any state | Always triggers on birthday, death anniversary, chosen holidays | Temporary flare |
The decay curve mirrors the natural arc from acute grief to integrated memory while still surfacing the person on meaningful dates. Any family member can Relight a candle at any time to return it to Bright for 30 days, and the app never asks why. Memorial prompts are fundamentally different from prompts for living relationships; see Prompts and Profiles.
Cross-Track Rules
- One entry, any track, advances the Personal streak.
- A user has at most one Personal track, unlimited Pairings, a tier-limited number of Family Spaces, and unlimited Memorial Candles (limited by storage tier).
- An entry in one track is never shown in another without an explicit share action; there is no automatic cross-posting.