Two of you need to look at the same screen for ten minutes. You want to solve that problem now, not adopt a company-wide platform and maintain a user roster afterward. Linkside is built for these small huddles: a free room holds two active participants in total, and a room with a licence holds up to four. Four is the hard limit.
That limit matters. Linkside is for a pair or a small group inside your team, not an all-hands meeting. If five or more people need to watch one screen at the same time, choose another tool.
The two-to-four-person huddle
Think of the quick “can you look at this?” call, an over-the-shoulder code or design review, a sprint-demo rehearsal, or a new-hire walkthrough. Each is a short, focused session where one person shows a screen and a few trusted teammates follow along.
A free room fits the host and one guest. A licence raises the room limit to four active participants total. It does not turn Linkside into a large-meeting product, and there is no higher participant tier.
One link, no rollout
Open the create-room page, switch on the waiting room if you want to approve guests, and create the room. The form asks for no name, email address, or account. Paste the invite link into the chat or message thread your team already uses.
Your teammate opens the link, keeps or changes the nickname Linkside generated, and selects Join room. There is no signup wall, captcha, download, extension, or plugin. The no-install flow works on both sides, and the full room setup takes about 30 seconds.
Create the room shortly before you need it. Linkside rooms are temporary, so a link is for the current huddle rather than next month’s calendar series.
The huddle itself: share one window, point at the line
When you start sharing, the browser asks what you want to show: a tab, a window, or an entire screen. Choose the code editor window or staging-site tab, and anything outside that selected surface stays out of the capture.
The host can use a visible pointer, laser, or drawing tool to mark the exact line under discussion. Both sides can talk with voice and use the in-session chat for a review link. Chat messages travel through the live peer connection and are not stored as a chat log.
What guests can and can’t do
Guests can watch, talk, and use chat. They cannot control your mouse or keyboard, draw on your screen, or start sharing their own screen in that room. Screen sharing and annotation belong to the room’s creator.
If a teammate needs to show their screen next, they create a fresh room and send a new link. They become the host of that room; Linkside does not pass presenter control inside the existing room.
The teammate on a phone can watch
Someone using a supported mobile browser can join as a guest and watch. Hosting requires a desktop browser; Chrome and Edge are the recommended choices.
What Linkside can see
Linkside tries to send screen and audio media directly from the host’s browser to each guest’s browser. Restrictive networks and some router setups can block that direct route. When that happens, Linkside can fall back to a TURN relay that forwards encrypted packets.
WebRTC protects the media with DTLS-SRTP encryption on both routes. The relay cannot read the screen or audio, and no Linkside server holds the media keys. Linkside also does not record or transcribe sessions, analyse screen contents, or keep chat logs.
There is still some operational metadata. The signaling service can observe that a room exists, roughly when guests join, and how long the session lasts. Relay infrastructure can observe IP-level traffic while it routes encrypted packets. Linkside does not pair those details with an account identity or retain them long term.
No accounts means no user management
When someone joins or leaves your team, there is no Linkside account to create or remove. There are no seats to assign, profiles to maintain, or SSO groups to update because neither hosts nor guests have Linkside accounts. The longer explanation is in why Linkside requires no account.
Rooms do not build up into a workspace history. An inactive room expires after about 15 minutes, passes through a short tombstone period, and is then deleted. Recordings and session history do not exist. The tradeoff is equally plain: there is no permanent team-room URL. Create a fresh room for each huddle and send its new link.
What’s free, what the licence changes
| Free room | With a licence | |
|---|---|---|
| Active participants | 2 total | Up to 4 total |
| Screen, voice, and chat | Included | Included |
| Waiting room | Included | Included |
| Direct connection limit | No time limit | No time limit |
| Encrypted relay fallback | 5-minute trial | No trial limit |
| Room password | Not available | Included |
The five-minute clock applies only if a free room cannot connect directly and must use the encrypted relay. It is not a five-minute limit on free screen sharing. Direct connections have no Linkside time limit.
A licence is a key, not a user account. The host enters it in the app, and Linkside remembers it on that host’s device. A valid key can also upgrade a live room from two participants to four without restarting the session. There is no team roster or admin console to manage.
For a pair review, a three-person rehearsal, or a four-person walkthrough, that is the whole arrangement: make a temporary room, send one link, and show the thing while it is useful.