What I do is fetching items from Firebase then saving them in a list and then I display them in a ListView. The Problem that I have now is that I check if the list has Items and if so it displays my ListView with the Items and if there are no items it displays a Text but even but even if there are items the text gets displayed but after pressing hot reload the items get shown.
My guess was that there is a Problem with the State of the Widgets overall because stuff like SetState has no effect or a Refresh Indicator
Is there a reason why the StreamBuilder is following your masterListStart().asStream as opposed to the masterList stream? I'm not saying it's wrong, its just not immediately obvious.
Either way, it's not rebuilding automatically because the only part of your displayStory method that is reactive to the stream doesn't get built until after the non empty list condition is met. Without implementing a reactive state management solution there's nothing in your code that automatically notifies any listeners that the state of the storysList has changed, which means nothing is triggering a rebuild. Which is why you have to hot reload to see the changes.
Without me getting too deep into your code, try returning the StreamBuilder at the top level of the displayStory method and putting all the conditionals inside its its builder method.