Share a chat like a doc: links, permissions, and who's in the room

Documents solved sharing decades ago, and the solution was boring on purpose: a link, some permissions, a little row of faces showing who has the file open. Chats somehow never got the same treatment. The industry standard is still a frozen snapshot link, which is the document equivalent of a photocopy taped to a wall.

Raven treats a conversation the way your document tools treat a file. Any chat's share menu mints you a link, and there are two kinds.

The private kind waits

The default is the private kind, and it waits. Opening it shows a blurred, locked view and two buttons, request to view or request to collaborate. Nothing gets revealed until you approve the request in your share dialog. The would-be reader waits, politely, and the veto stays yours. Administering a Google Doc teaches you exactly the right instincts here.

Public links, for the readable things

A public link flips the default: any signed-in Raven account can read, with no per-person approval. Public means readable, never writable, and never anonymous either. Logged-out crawling is off the table by design, so every reader is a real account and the audit trail means something.

The eye in the corner

Presence is the small feature that changes the feel of the whole thing. An eye icon shows who is in the room right now and for how long, "Priya, viewing since 3 minutes ago", and when someone leaves it says when they left instead of pretending they vanished. Writing into a known room feels different from writing into a void, the same shift that made shared documents feel alive. The model's behavior does not change; one viewer or five, Raven works the same.

Ownership never moves

Stop sharing, flip a link's visibility, or remove a participant, and the room adjusts immediately. Delete a chat and its share graph is released too, so a conversation you remove does not linger half-alive in someone else's sidebar.

The sharing model is the plumbing. What it enables is live shared chats with your whole team, and both start in the same place: open the Raven app, press Share.