Comment by Reisen | Hacker News Reader

Comment by Reisen | Hacker News Reader

I use Keybase as a daily driver and I really love the platform, but almost every other chat client I use when switching from Keybase feels butter smooth in comparison. These tools look like a great addition, and the Stellar integration is something I think has a lot of potential if it ends up being able to manage other wallets as well.

I just really wish more love would go into the UX of the application. I have duplicate undeletable conversations with contacts, duplicate folders in KBFS that I cannot delete or access which cause I/O errors in tools that do full system scans. I keep running into errors in the UI with obscure error codes that I keep reporting to no avail. There are currently 3,292~ open issues on Github at the time of writing so it's difficult to track what the team is focusing on.

Everything feels just a little too janky.

Still, I don't believe there is any other decent alternative to Keybase that offers the same identity based mechanism for communication, and Keybase absolutely nails that. I can message half the users on HN with very little friction. People can encrypt and send me documents without registering with a single page view. A bit of polish and I think Keybase could shine, but right now It's hard to suggest as a Slack alternative.

Keybase is a little like "Linux on the desktop". I love it, I use it. With my help, even my dad can use it. The underlying architecture is righteous, it's open-source, and I want it to be good enough so that everybody can use it... but it's just not. Too many basic things that "normal people" want to do just don't work well enough.

Keybase's desktop and mobile apps sometimes hang while decrypting old messages, and until you force quit, the messages won't load.

The Mac app gets into this mode where it can't be hidden, and just insists on staying on the screen.

It doesn't work at all, for any reasonable value of work, on the iPad (it shows a tiny little phone-sized window that fills about 25% of the screen, and doesn't support rotate so it's rotated 90 degrees if you try to type into it with the keyboard).

Etc.

OTOH, the underlying platform seems well-designed and that's obviously where most of the effort is going — it's been a steady march of new and valuable features. They only added the chat feature itself 3 years ago. Keybase git, Stellar wallet, Keybase SSH, the awesome new bot architecture...

While I too wish the apps were smooth and polished, Keybase might be right to focus on the platform first. Making a good app using cross-platform UI toolkits is hard.

Those toolkits are evolving fast, too. It's not inconceivable that in another 3 years, the apps they have today will have been completely replaced by new ones based on a next-generation UI library that runs on top of Tauri[1] or whatever the new hotness is in 2023, and maybe those will be smoother and more polished due to general advances in cross-platform app cores and UI libraries, and if that happens we might end up being glad that the Keybase people spent their energy on building out this reliable crypto platform instead of trying to fix Electron's window layering bugs or whatever.

But yeah, in 2020, I agree the Keybase app's aren't even close to being polished enough to replace Slack for most people. (And Slack itself is pretty awful!)

[1] https://github.com/tauri-apps/tauri (no idea if that will take off, it's just an example)

I'm with you. I feel like Keybase are the only people actually innovating on "usable cryptography", except maybe Signal?

Just needs a bit more polish.

Polish and a better sense that their long term business model makes the most sense for the sort of infrastructural platform they want to be. Cryptography infrastructure seems like something that should be delegated to something much more like a 501(c)3 than a for-profit corporation.

I'll settle for a for profit corporation that guarantees that I don't have to trust them... Not sure that's Keybase, but I'm curious.

For a slightly different perspective (1:1 chat instead of Slack replacement) I've had a better experience with Keybase than Signal or Telegram for end-to-end-encrypted 1:1 conversation.

Telegram's "Secret" (e2ee) chats are device-specific, which pretty much disqualifies it for regular use.

For Signal, I've consistently found that if I'm logged into three devices (e.g. two laptops and a phone), my phone will buzz and a notification will appear but then immediately disappear. If you don't notice the vibration, you'll miss the message until the next time you open the app.

Agreed. And some accessibility related work would also help, for now, i doubt i would have any chance convincing any of my visually impaired friends to use the keybase apps.

Keybase still lacks essential features like being able to mute specific group chats. On Android it's all or nothing: I can either get a notification every time someone spams a chat, or I can turn notifications off and not even know when someone directly messages me.

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