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Comment by freedomben | Hacker News Reader

This makes me really miss Keybase.io. Anyone around from Keybase? Will it just bit rot away or will it get some attention/love in the future?

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I really thought Keybase was going to be huge. It had such potential!

I wish it had created a SSO feature to auth 3rd party apps. I think that would have boosted adoption.

I think it's going to rot away, but I really wish it wouldn't.

I really liked the storage and sharing features, the ability to create groups which have git, storage, chat etc that just works. But the devs should have integrated with or made a layer on top of github, gitlab and other git hosting services because a lot of folks wouldn't move their codebase.

I wonder if we'll ever see something similar? "Digital Identity Management" seems like it would be a great use case. What with a wallet feature built in, it seems like there's not much of a leap to having multiple currencies represented there. Plus it could have implemented a password repository or integrated Bitwarden into the storage backend and have the whole thing signed/encrypted by GnuPG.

It will probably bit rot away, or be rebooted when Zoom wants to make a PR move. In my opinion, the Keybase founders always intended to sell it off and never intended to keep their promises of OSS-ing the tech. It was a cool idea, but I never saw any vision for the idea or really what benefits it brought the tech community.

Do you have any citations for the "founders intended to sell it off" part?

There's a "In my opinion" in front of that sentence. You don't need citations for opinions.

Absolutely, but there are at least some circumstantial things you have heard/read to opine this way?

I still use Keybase heavily for work and personal contacts, and the Linux client just got updated. It's not really a platform with high visibility usage (which is a benefit IMHO).

There are several great e2ee features:

  - 250GB of free storage
  - personal subdomain that serves your public folder
  - git (e2ee)

>250GB of free storage

Would be more useful if you could upload more than one file at a time.

I guess it's intended for use on a computer. I could drag multiple folders/files into my /keybase/private folder.

In what situations does that matter?

I've never seen or hear anyone I know use Keybase.io for actual texting, and I work at a large software company. Everyone just uses it for PGP keys, then forgets it exists.

I was one of the early adopters (July 2014) and I used it for texting for a time.

When they started pushing cryptocurrency I felt it was time to leave, a short time after Zoom bought them out and I was glad that my account was already purged.

For PGP keys, I've managed to replace my usage of Keybase with Keyoxide.

1: https://keyoxide.org/ 2: https://codeberg.org/keyoxide/keyoxide-web

I do and know several people who do too. Although the UI could be improved.

What's so special about keybase? I feel like Signal is current solution to go to if you just need easy e2ee (espexially because of its big userbase). Otherwise it's Matrix for me as it offers "the future of messaging" (well, you wish)

Keybase does way more than just the messaging. Fundamentally it's a really cool solution to the digital identity problem. With that solved, they built a lot of useful tools around those identities, ranging from secure messaging to secure file storage and git hosting.

I should have said this is my comment above, but keybase had a CLI from the start that would do anything the UI would. It would make it usable on a headless machine, and was so easy to script. With the keybase CLI you could write a simple chat bot in a few lines of bash. I had a few "reminder" bots that were just lines in a crontab. Those were the killer features for me.

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