People use storytelling to persuade, to entertain, to inform, and to make sense of their experiences as a community. But where does storytelling most often take place online? When are people more likely to rely on storytelling as a rhetorical strategy? And how do different people recognize stories as stories? I'll present work on developing a dataset of diverse social media stories that enables new computational analyses of storytelling both across online communities and within specific social contexts. I'll also share evidence of the diversity of story perceptions across audiences, quantifying differences in reasoning about what differentiates storytelling from other kinds of online communication.