Permissions in Fibery are hard to understand

This is insane, very high pace of features lately. Love them.

I have to say though, I cannot work my way through the whole permissions thing very easily. We now have database access, space access, custom access templates, and also entities you can share. It’s becoming quite complicated, and I don’t see the logic and connections to everything. Just my 2 cents on that.

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We will create some material to explain it all once all relevant features have been released, but for the time being, think of it as nested sharing:

You can share a space (which means sharing all views and databases in the space)
You can share a database (which means sharing all the entities in the databases)
You can share an entity

Access levels govern the amount of sharing at each of these tiers, so …

For a Space, you can grant Creator, Editor, Contributor or Viewer access
For a Database, you can grant Creator, Owner, Editor, Submitter, Commenter or Viewer access
For an Entity, you can grant Owner, Editor, Commenter of Viewer access + any custom access level you choose (= custom access templates).

The reason that the named access levels are not the same for all three tiers of the sharing hierarchy, is that each tier covers different functionality.
In other words, there are things that you can do in a Space (e.g. create a document, add a smart folder, etc.) which are meaningless for a Database/Entity, and there are things you can do in a Database/Entity (e.g. add a comment) which are meaningless for a Space.

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I appreciate the help, but it still sounds complicated.

I found the notion permission system to be very understandable. But it was based on a hierarchical folder structure it seems.

Also, I’m really missing the functionality to add groups, from the account level. And then assign groups to a space, database, etc. It might be possible but couldn’t figure out why.

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Also similar to notion:

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I think that’s a path you are not able to take anymore, but I’m not seeing the added value with Fibery’s permission system just yet. Maybe once I figure it all out. Could just be me :sweat_smile:

As far as I know, Notion does not have per-entity permissions, which makes it easier to implement an access/sharing system.

Fibery permission schema is quite elegant conceptually, taking into consideration that you can manage access across connected graph from high level to low level (Collection of Databases (Space) → Single Database → Collection of Entities → Single Entity). This task is INSANELY complex to solve and I think our solution is just great (and I rarely praise things so much), but we need to complete some parts and polish UI to make it shine.

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I made a gif to try to explain how the three types of access (space, database and entity level) work.
I hope it makes sense.
Permissions

Note: for the entity access, the depth of sharing (the blue boxes) depends up on the access template used. So it is possible to share only A2, or share A2, B1, B2 & B4, or share A2, B1, B2, B4, C1, C3 & C5

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