Distinguish people and devices as separate sharing targets #186
Description
At the moment, sharing a document uses the same mechanism and mental model whether the goal is to collaborate with another person or to sync the document to one of your own devices. But from a user perspective these are two very different actions:
- Sharing with a person is a social action: you are inviting someone to collaborate.
- Sharing with one of your own computers is closer to personal synchronization.
Because these two intentions are not distinguished, some confusing situations can arise. For example, if a document is shared with a single person and that person syncs it across multiple devices, they appear as multiple collaborators rather than as one person connected from several devices. From the user’s point of view, the document was shared with one person, so seeing several “participants” can be misleading.
If Reflection already has a notion of stable identity (as suggested by consistent pseudonyms and avatars), it might make sense to eventually acknowledge this distinction in the UI, even in a lightweight way. One possible consequence of this separation is that sharing a document could become an expression of intent, for example:
- share with a person
- sync with one of your devices
- generate a join code (as today)
This is not yet meant as a concrete proposal for UI or implementation, but as a way to surface a distinction that already exists in practice and may become more important with upcoming work on access controls and encryption. This idea is also related to the broader question of having a global view of collaborators (#185) but I wanted to raise it here as a standalone discussion.