Ask HN: How will you replace Keybase? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: How will you replace Keybase?

35 pointssimon15739 comments

I run a small business with a few friends and Keybase has been great for us. It got all that we need: chat with channels, file sharing with a folder structure and git. That it's end-to encrypted* is a great bonus. Since Zoom announced that bought Keybase yesterday, we are no longer comfortable depending on Keybase and will transition to other services.

What are some replacements to the features Keybase offers?

*proper e2e, not in the lame way Zoom described its interpretation of e2e...

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So far I've replaced Keybase with:

Association of keys with identity -> https://keys.pub/

Git -> Github via git-remote-gcrypt

IM -> Telegram. Not a proper replacement, but works for most of my contacts. Something really secret can be shared via GPG. I guess for your small business a self-hosted Mattermost instance will fit.

Files and directories sharing -> syncthing. I use it mostly between my devices.

I've seen keys.pub mentioned a bunch now. Time to check it out, I guess. Sure looks (from a UI perspective) better than the gpa (Gnu Privacy Assistant) I used before: https://www.gnupg.org/related_software/gpa/

Even though the docs clearly state: "This project is in development and has not been audited."

There’s been some discussion on this topic here, though a slightly different angle, just for reference - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23103386

I'm probably going to use GNU JAMI as a replacement, as I was already using it to a lesser extent before this debacle

Does anyone know of an equivalent product/solution for the cryptographically-linked social media identities feature of Keybase?

Technically the cryptographic links can still be verified even if Keybase doesn't exist anymore, but they did provide a user-friendly interface to set them up, etc.

Some minimal open-source tool for the "cryptographically-linked social media identities feature" would indeed be awesome! Would be a shame if all those links ended up being abandoned.

Keybase Chat -> Matrix/Riot Zoom -> Jitsi Meet

Both of the above alternatives are end to end encrypted (E2EE)

As for the social keys aspect of Keybase, hope that Keybase open sources their solution.

I wish there were a way to tie my existing GPG keys to a keys.pub account.

As it is, I'm probably going to add a well-known to my personal website with my keys.

You can get all this by running your own server. The plus side of this is that you will also protect a lot more meta data this way (not all, but more).

On your own server, you can host your own git repos, your own IRC server, and your own file storage.

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