Hacker News Reader

The first I ran into it, it was basically a key server where you could associate your public key with social media "proof" -- someone who had access to the private key proved it by posting from this Twitter account, this Github user, this Reddit user, etc.

It seems like the last year or two they've really been ramping up ways to actually _use_ those keys though. They do have a chat app, which I've used with coworkers, but only to share stuff we don't want to send over Slack. It seems like at least part of the issue they've got with the homepage is that their "core" product -- hosting a public key for someone -- isn't really very interesting compared to the satellite offerings.

It's a lot, isn't your third quote a pretty good description?

> Keybase is for anyone. Imagine a Slack for the whole world, except end-to-end encrypted across all your devices. Or a Team Dropbox where the server can't leak your files or be hacked.

It's not much of a reach to assume familiarity with Slack and Dropbox; the message is clearly that Keybase is those (via Keybase Chat & FS) but encrypted.

For what it's worth, it's also a keyserver, and (now) git remote.

> isn't your third quote a pretty good description?

It's not. I think the person who wrote it think it's good marketing, but even that, it is not.

Here, try to see if this makes any sense as a product description:

> FeedHamster is for anyone! Imagine a Yelp that's customized just for you! Or a YouTube feed that only shows you interesting videos that _you_ would like!

> Install FeedHamster now!

Now, can you guess what FeedHamster does? Maybe it curates content? Honestly I have no idea. I just made it up. It doesn't really say anything useful at all, but I think it makes more sense that that description on Keybase's website.

Tarsnap was a good example of a service selling to technically apt customer base. Guys who have years of IT training would love to read about deduplication and picodollars.

Keybase isn’t charging money to begin with, so “sales pitches” are not their primary concern.

Also, they are marketing to “the masses” with the idea that more people should have secure e2e encrypted communication and collaboration solutions where identity is cryptographically proven.

But if their welcome page started showing diagrams of encryption pathways and key derivation algorithm names with server client relationship diagrams, I guarantee no one besides people in tech will download it.

I still think they need to do better selling the idea to the masses, I in no way think their current front page is sufficient, but I understand that right now they aren’t concentrating on sales pitches.

No, it's not. It says exactly nothing.

IMO opinion, the homepage is great - it covers the headlines. What it is missing is a link to a 'features' page that provides more details on the actual services and benefits.

Fundamentally, at this time your market is the more technically minded people who are going to want something a bit more concrete than "Imagine a Slack...".

I'm fairly new to Keybase, but essentially, at it's core, Keybase is a software/service for managing trust of identity/public keys, and easily sharing public keys with "trusted" parties, based on Keybase's trust model.

All of the other features you've mentioned are built on top of that key exchange, and use it to offer encrypted services.

My read:

It's a product that's great for some security-oriented developers but hard to sell to others conceptually.

In order to make it appealing and useful to a more general audience, they've added extras which are comparable to Dropbox and Slack, just less featured and more secure.

Which seems a good approach given their constraints.

It's Jabberwocky.