How are you building collaboration capabilities in your product?

Hey everyone 👋

Most apps I see these days have some kind of collaboration, such as sharing resources and controlling access to those resources between individuals or teams: Google Drive allows you to share a file or folder with specific people or anyone who has the URL, Notion allows you to share a workspace with your team, and so on. I assume that building similar features is common among the Indie Hackers community as well.

As a matter of fact I am building something similar right now and what seemed simple at first, got pretty complex pretty quickly! For instance, sharing a workspace with documents or sharing a single document, inviting other users by email or sending a link for them to join, controlling who can read or modify what, setting all these permissions in the database, setting up emails, and dealing with business logic. What a nightmare!

I am curious how are people in the IH community enabling collaboration in their products? How are you building it and how complex has it become? What pains are you facing?