The point about privacy has been made before and I see the value in it. But, users regularly share documents with third parties. In addition this was expected to be used primarily by non-business users (such as students) and in the future enhance privacy if people see value in it.

It doesn't work as a self-hosted service, because you need to be able to quickly share a link with other participants.

It's not a honeypot.

The (MS Teams) feature is very cool and potentially useful, but: it only works on certain types of meetings/calls, and the way it’s implemented, people get lost, because they start playing with their slides, and then it’s not clear they can press the “Live” button to sync up again, so then they end up interrupting the speaker to say they are lost, or multiple people will say they are not clear where they are…

A related datapoint, which feels like a "know your tools" thing, but PowerPoint itself has always supported a lot of powerful options like Presenter View and "Browsed by an Individual".

If you've got multiple monitors, just present to a different monitor, with or without Presenter View (which shows notes and such) and screen share only the monitor with the slides.

If you're on a single monitor (which ultrawides are making more somewhat common again), you can go to Slide Show > Set Up Slide Show and switch the Presentation Type to "Browsed by an Individual" which keeps the slide show windowed, but hides most controls and focuses just on the slides, then screen share only that window. At the moment PowerPoint still doesn't support Presenter View when running slides this way, possibly because it predates modern ultrawides and people didn't have the screen space before to have multiple such windows open side by side.

("Browsed by an Individual" is also stupidly hard to discover if you have never had reason to "Set Up Slide Show", a dialog somewhat more common in 90s PowerPoint because the flow sometimes was that you would need to "Set Up" before you could F5 launch it. I've seen so many company presentations presented with the full fat PPT normal/editing view window simply because no one knows to look for "Browsed by an Individual" to focus the slides.)

You have the option to limit if viewers can detach.

Reveal.js with the multiplex plugin [0] does that. I write my presentation in Quarto [1] and render them to reveal.

0: https://revealjs.com/multiplex/

1: https://quarto.org/docs/presentations/revealjs/

Treat it more like a cool proof of concept, now you can vibecode your own and use it with your own data

I know. Kinda hard to develop trust, but I am considering making all slides E2E encrypted or at least have the option for it.

I wanted to first know if people would like something like this.

It can now be switched off

No retention at all, not even a deleted folder: https://slidebyside.com/privacy

I wanted to see if anybody wants this too, and hopefully develop it into a business.

The actual idea came to me back in University when I was presenting projects where I worked with other students. This way students can share a presentation only they can control.