Keybase is effectively in maintenance mode after being acquihired by Zoom.

If anything, Signal should adopt some of the crypto identity primitives Keybase was known for [1] for persona management that builds on (but still supports) phone DID identifiers. Would Zoom sell or donate Keybase infra to Signal Foundation? That'd be swank.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Keybase

Keybase showed a lot of promise, but ever since they were bought by Zoom I’ve been hesitant to depend on it. There’s a good chance it’ll be neglected or cannibalized in the future, not to mention the real or imagined CCP influence. Perhaps failure is a self fulfilling prophecy.

I tried signal, matrix, Riot, Slack, Discord, Messenger, Hangouts, and Keybase is by far the best option.

It is in an uncertain place though since Zoom bought them and moved its developers to work on Zoom. There has only been one small update to Keybase since zoom purchased them.

I've been a Keybase user for a couple years now. I started using Signal when it was TextSecure. From Signal Insights 98% of my conversations are encrypted because I pushed Signal hard on friends, family and colleagues early on. I talk to one person on Keybase that refuses to use Signal (not exactly sure their rationale anymore). For some reason I thought Keybase was going to give me the early experience of Twitter, where I was able to interact with people in the same field without having to know them IRL. And while Keybase does recommend I follow / interact with some of those people it feels less attainable to start up a random conversation or jump into a public thread like I did early on with Twitter. To be clear I'm not saying that's Keybase's fault. As for getting non-technical family and friends using Keybase, well... I find that it's not as approachable. I think it is more convenient in some cases (chat history is probably the #1 item), but it's also clearly geared towards people who likely have an idea what PGP is (re: PGP key identity proof, etc). I wish there was something that mashed up the best of Signal, Keybase and Twitter. But at the end of the day I'd probably still use Signal for the majority of direct person to person messaging because of the time and personal effort I've put into getting my circle to use it. The switching cost is too high a bar now to consider anything unless it's exponentially better (and I don't think that exists). I also really don't like the fact that Zoom owns Keybase and can't see myself recommending it much moving forward over alternatives like Element.