Experimental Slack-to-Keybase team importer
keybase.io
keybase.io
Initially, it was a way to maintain your identity online. Which I really liked. Finally a way to get to people's keys without GPG keyservers.
Then the Mac app placed itself in the menu bar, loaded a "helper", installed a ton of crap, asked for my private keys, and I was no longer sure what it's really doing.
Then Keybase started morphing into… well, I'm not really clear what it's becoming these days.
1) Works surprisingly well
2) Search was previously an issue but now fixed
3) Having a shared drive is great
4) Not having a spell check or giphy integration is awful. I get why because the non-local ones leak data. But it’s still terrible.
Will stick with Keybase.
Ah spell-check in the desktop app. We explored one library and weren't happy. We're visiting option soon, but yeah, privacy is critical.
NB for others: may leak metadata so use with that in mind. One can also just whitelist the giphy domain only.
Perhaps I'm jaded but I intensely distrust any service that is free (as in free beer), because it's raison d'être is unclear and unpredictable.
E.g. I liked WhatsApp while you could use it for free and see ads, or you could pay a fee and avoid the ads. It's clear. You could opt to pay for a product or be the product and get a service in return.
Here it's not immediately clear.
You can compare it to public domain work. They are free, as in beer, because their creator is long dead or chose to put them there. He's not gaining anything in return like companies are.
Open source coders provide software development and support services for free. They’re not providing a physical product.
I feel like you’re stuck on some ephemeral concept around what a service is.
Human beings provide a services for a variety of prices. A business provides a profit generating pipeline.
And we all see how those can vanish over night. Or just decide to kill things coughgooglecough
Seems like a contrived line in the sand, IMO
Safest thing to assume is that as long as they don't charge for it, you are getting a free service without any promises about quality of service, stability, etc. As Slack just had an outage, that just proves the point that such promises can be broken regardless of whether you pay or not.
If you want properly free stuff, you'll have to run your own servers with any of the several OSS solutions out there.
https://github.com/keybase/keybase-issues/issues/788
Slightly more recently in 2015 there was this blog post:
https://keybase.io/blog/2015-07-15/keybase-raises-series-a
The salient point is:
> In two simple steps: (1) we hope to earn a reputation for creating superior, simple crypto clients.
> Then, (2) some people may turn to us for more advanced, hosted solutions. That could be anything from team management (in the enterprise) to hosting of public, signed files.
> On this second idea, we are already working on something big and filesystemy, designed to address pain points for developers first. That product will be free for everyone, unless you need massive storage.
From where I sit, in my place of knowing very little, I am confused. Some of the keybase things I have read about make it sound like it's almost a perfect fit for so many things I want in the world, then I hear that their chat thing is really great, but has a couple small issues that make is unusable for what I am looking for. I find their identity thing is really awesome, but more centralized and perhaps will at time censor people, and I can't use it. I am confused, and perhaps the brand is tainted from my skewed understanding of the issues, which is why I ask a question, not made some know-it-all statement about how it whatever.
I have not used it. the things I've seen make me think there is really great people making really powerful and great things there, unfortunately some of the businesses I work with could get me removed from their system perhaps, so I am not spending any time trying it out. I have been down that road with google, with vimeo (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20302923 ), facebook, and with so many other things.
Basically I look for things that would not, and preferable could not, ban Larry Flint. If they will ban Larry's posts then I don't need to waste time with it. So far that leaves very few services to actually spend time with.
Again, this is not an attempt to spread and fear or uncertainty or doubt, I would guess that 99% of people will never get banned from keybase (I don't know really, I don't use it, or know if they delete spammers, or alt-right-wrong or whatever either)
Now I'm more confused as your answer mentions they are not supporting Mastadon servers that don't censor porn, hookers, and strippers - so 'not supporting' maybe that's what I should of been asking about, I guess that means they are not banning users, just making it so their user's services can not connect? I don't know, at this point it's already used up so much of my time, I am sorry I asked, not trying to fud anyone else on top of my not understanding.
*edited to add link to vimeo ban explanation, which relates to my questioning, but not directly to keybase.
Keybase has this concept of Identity Proofs. You put a special signature on a page in a specific way that Keybase has vetted. For example, I can put a signature on my HN about page (which I have), give Keybase my username and they can prove that the HN user is me which proves to other Keybase users that I am real (i.e., not a bot nor a fake profile created for trolling/nefarious purposes). On it's own, my HN proof isn't very strong but coupled with other services and I now have a complex profile of proofs that spreads the social vetting across multiple companies/organizations.
Mastodon is a social messaging platform like twitter mixed with custom message boards of the 90s/00s. The key bit from the latter is that each "instance" is run by anyone on their own hardware with their own level of security determined by whomever administrates the server. Keybase (according to the comments linked above) decided that they would only be setting up this Identity Proofing with the most general instances and not with more specialized topic instances (particularly sex work or porn) because (these are my assumptions wrt their reasoning) there is a time cost to setting this stuff up but also to not align themselves with instances that may be taboo to some of their userbase (read: potential paying clients).
To get to the point: Keybase does not have read access to your content (they use E2E encryption), but they do make certain decisions about how their tools integrate with the outside world. I don't know their politics but I would guess that since they are working towards finding clients to setup custom instances of their model (to start making money), they are just trying to avoid misaligning themselves.
I wish I could clone the keybase and keybase chat thing and run it federated / uncensored with opt-in group follow moderation. So far it looks like Matrix and Mastadon maybe ipfs / peertube kind of stuff will be the closest things for what I could use comfortably given the increasing censorship and need for mainstream monetization of most projects.
Thanks again for explaining, I was indeed getting confused about the services around them and now I understand a bit better how the pieces fit.
I hope this is just out of sheer legal paranoia rather than some weird moral imperative. It’d be a very odd stance, imo.