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Comment by nif2ee | Hacker News Reader

Keybase claims to be a modern replacement for PGP yet I don't think they even have some SDK that acts like gpgme. This is a very rudimentary feature to implement but it can unleash a whole new world for applications that use signatures and E2EE.

Keybase is a good idea and they got lucky with getting popular but they haven't really implemented features that would make them essential. Most people just sign up and forget about it.

EDIT: Seriously why the downvotes without clarifying? Has Keybase adopted astroturfing on HN like Brave and DuckDuckGo?

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They're building out plenty of applications themselves. That's the right approach. PGP didn't unleash a whole new world for applications because it didn't attack usability, which isn't something you do with an API.

On the contrary, Keybase has the advantage of linking keys to social accounts. If Keybase have client libraries that use signing/verifying, encryption/decryption programmatically outside their bloated CLI that would be a great tool for authentication/authorization that can replace oAuth2/SSO for example. This itself can be a sufficient business plan for enterprise customers and I am not sure why they have not done it after all these years.

Obviously they want to lock users inside their tool for business reasons.

You don't unleash a whole new world, period. The old one still exists.

The only way I see us migrating away from our current gpg use cases is if all the integrations we use somehow went unsupported. There's simply no reason to assume the risk of inserting Keybase (or anyone else's) dependencies.

Approximately nobody uses PGP or GPG, there's no reason to backfill those features or use cases.

Approximately no one, except anyone who commits code at the F100 company I work for, several other F100s I know people at, Debian, Ubuntu, and a number of other infra projects.

I'm willing to believe nobody in your corner of the world does. That's not the only corner of the world.

That must be literally dozens of people.

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