Why ephemeral documents
Ephemeral documents are documents that delete themselves after a set time. On sharemd.net, every document created without an account expires 15 days after creation and its content is deleted automatically. Expiry is the default, not an option you have to remember.
This post explains the reasoning, and the places where that choice costs something.
Most shared text has a short life
Think about what people share as a link on a normal working day. An answer from an AI assistant, pasted for a colleague to check. Notes for a meeting that happens tomorrow. A draft changelog for a release on Friday. A log excerpt attached to an incident thread.
All of these matter intensely for a few days and then not at all. The decision gets made, the meeting ends, the release ships. The document does not stop existing when it stops mattering, though. In most tools it stays, linked from old messages, sitting in a workspace, findable by anyone who has the URL.
As AI tools make producing text nearly free, the volume of this short-lived material grows. A lot of it nobody needs to keep.
What a forgotten link costs
A document nobody reads anymore still has a few properties that matter.
It is still readable. A link in an old channel, a forwarded email or a pasted ticket keeps working. Whoever finds it later can open the content, including people who were never meant to see it.
It can be wrong. A plan that was revised, an answer that was corrected, a draft that changed before publication. Stale documents get found and read as if they were current.
Someone has to clean it up. In practice, nobody does. Deleting old shared documents is nobody’s job, and it competes with work that has a deadline.
Data minimization as a default
There is a long-standing principle in privacy and security practice called data minimization: keep only the data you need, for only as long as you need it. Data that no longer exists cannot be exposed, misread or misused.
The principle is easy to agree with and hard to practice, because practicing it usually depends on someone deciding to delete things. Defaults decide most outcomes. If keeping is the default, things are kept. If expiring is the default, things expire unless someone makes an effort.
sharemd.net applies the principle in a plain form: the document is deleted 15 days after it was created. This is a design choice, not a certification; the point is that the system holds less, for less time, without anyone having to act.
What expiry looks like in practice
The document shows a badge with the days left. It turns red when three days or fewer remain, so the author and readers can see the deadline coming. After the 15 days, the content is deleted, and the link shows a page saying the document has expired. The server answers that request with HTTP 410, the status code for content that is gone on purpose.
Fifteen days is long enough for a review cycle, a sprint, or a discussion that drags into the next week, and short enough that the link will not resurface months later.
Where this has real costs
Expiry by default is a trade-off, and some of its costs are real today.
- No extension. There is no way to extend a document. If something turns out to matter longer, it has to be moved somewhere permanent: export the
.mdand put it in your docs tool or repository. - No early deletion. There is also no way to delete a document before its 15 days are up, and no way to revoke a write link once sent. Expiry limits how long a mistake lives; it does not undo it. Read before you share.
- Not for reference material. Documentation, policies and anything a team maintains belong in tools built for permanence, with history and permissions.
Expiry also does not make a link secret. Shared documents are not indexed by search engines and can be reached only with the link, but anyone who has the link can read the document while it exists.
Ephemeral is a fit, not a rule
None of this argues that documents should be ephemeral in general. Plenty of writing should last for years. The argument is narrower: for the large category of text that people share to get a quick read, a check or a decision, a default that cleans up after itself fits the way that text is used.
That is also why sharemd.net requires no account. A tool for short-lived documents should not ask for a long-lived relationship before it is useful. You open the editor, paste, share, and the document goes away on its own. If you want to try the flow, the step-by-step guide covers it, and the about page describes the other principles behind the product.