Sharing Without the Chaos

Part 5 of 7: Documents in the Wild

Sam edits. Sam works with a freelance writer named Jo, and Jo does not have an InterlinedList account and has no particular plans to get one. Sam needs Jo to read the style guide, and later needs Jo to actually edit a draft, and does not want to email a Google Doc link that thirty people will end up forwarding. This is the classic sharing headache, and it is the thing this feature is built to remove.

Open any document you own, hit Share, and you get one modal with three different ways to let someone in. Let me walk all three, because they solve genuinely different problems.

The Share modal for a document: an invite-by-email form with a role selector, a share-link generator with role and expiry, an active editor link, and a Make public toggle

One modal, three doors: invite a specific person, mint a link, or make it public.

Roles first, because they run through everything

Before the doors, the three roles, because you pick one every time you share. Read-only can view the document and nothing else. Edit can change the content. Admin can do everything Edit can, plus rename it, toggle its public visibility, and delete it. Sam gives Jo Read-only for the style guide and Edit for the draft. That is the whole mental model: view, change, or manage.

Invite a specific person, even one with no account

The first door is an email invite, and it is the one that fixes Jo. Sam types Jo's email, picks a role, and sends. Jo does not need an account at the moment of the invite. When Jo signs up (or signs in) with that email, the invite is waiting and the access attaches. And it is tied to the email on purpose: forwarding the message to someone else does not hand them the keys, because the grant only claims on a matching, verified address. That is the anti-chaos part. An invite is for a person, not for whoever happens to receive a forwarded email.

A link, when you do not know who yet

The second door is a share link. Sometimes you do not have a specific person in mind: you want a link to paste into a Slack channel or a newsletter. So you mint one, choose the role it grants, and optionally give it an expiry date. A viewer link works for anyone who opens it; an edit or admin link lets a signed-in visitor claim that access. And you can revoke any link later, which means a link you posted in a channel six months ago is not a permanent hole. Generate, hand out, expire, revoke. Normal, controllable.

Or just make it public

The third door is the big one: the Make public toggle. Flip it on and the document is readable by anyone with the URL, no account, no login. That is Part 7's whole story, so I will not spend it here, except to say the switch lives right in this same modal so "share with two people" and "share with the world" are one decision surface.

Now the tier note, and it is the good kind. Granting access is a Subscriber action: you need the paid plan to invite people, mint links, or make a document public. But the people on the other end pay nothing. Jo reads the style guide for free and edits the draft for free. A reader of a public doc pays nothing. You buy the ability to open the door; walking through it is free.

Sharing solves access. It does not, by itself, solve two people typing at the same time. That is next: live cursors, and a merge that keeps everyone's words.

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