How Held works

Choose what you want to share

Use Message for a read-only note, a set of files, or a voice recording. Its text and attachment descriptions are fixed when you create the link. Use Peer chat when everyone needs to reply: up to 16 participants can exchange text, files, and voice recordings in one room.

1. Open Message or Peer chat and prepare what you want to share.
2. Create the link and send the complete secret link to the people you want to invite.
3. Keep the necessary browsers connected while people join, read, or receive files.

The complete link grants access

The part of an invitation after # contains the secret needed to read the room. That fragment is not sent as part of the ordinary page request to Held’s server. Share the complete link through a channel you trust; anyone who obtains it may be able to join while the room remains available.

The coordination server arranges membership and browser connections. Message text, chat posts, attachment contents, and filenames travel between browsers with end-to-end encryption. The server still handles connection metadata, and direct connections do not hide participants’ network addresses.

Availability follows the people holding it

A default creator-held message ends when its original creator session leaves, reloads, disconnects, or expires. A carried message stays available while at least one admitted holder remains. Its original connected creator can also end it, but loses that authority after disconnecting.

A group chat ends when its final participant leaves or expires. Groups have no owner-controlled End action. These are live-session rules, not a read-once setting or a scheduled destruction timer. A silent connection loss can take time to be detected.

Understand what remains

Held has no server mailbox from which an ended message or chat can be recovered. Recipients can still copy text, take screenshots, or save files. Ending a room cannot erase those copies.

The Short link tool is separate: it stores a normal destination URL on the server until its selected expiry. Those redirects are not end-to-end encrypted and should not be used to shorten secret Held invitations.