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Comment by peterldowns | Hacker News Reader

My friend who joined Zoom via the acquisition said it’s abandoned, all future work is on Zoom, no plans to do anything other than bare minimum maintenance on the keybase systems. No surprise here. Bit of a shame though.

Edit: following up on this since i think it was slightly misleading -- this has always been Zoom's public opinion since they announced the acquisition. Their goal was always to integrate the Keybase technology into Zoom. See their blogpost for more https://blog.zoom.us/zoom-acquires-keybase-and-announces-goa...

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It is being maintained and still actively used. The largest user, afaik, is Chia Network (https://www.chia.net) and they rely on that for the bulk of their internal and external community comms. If Zoom decides not to host the servers anymore I predict they will likely try to acquire it from Zoom or re-implement the server portion.

There is probably a profitable business to be built to implement an opensource version of the Keybase server that is backwards compatible with the client and then start charging enterprises a reasonable price for data storage and communications to host it in the cloud. Zoom is sitting on a potential gold mine and they are just letting it languish.

Yes, Zoom is sitting on a gold mine and it is online video conferencing. Keybase is a silver mine at best. Guess which mine you would prioritize?

Hard disagree. A global identity network that has end-to-end encrypted chat that can be used for secure authentication in a variety of scenarios and allows users to exchange data is a much bigger market than video conferencing. If anything Zoom should be working on integrating Zoom video conferencing into the Keybase product.

If average people cared about security like they do real time video conferencing then Keybase would have not been for sale.

how big is Chia Network, 50 employees? I have a feeling my town's school has more zoom users and provides more revenue to Zoom, Inc then Chia.

It would be very cool if they acquired it tho, and I agree it is a potentially profitable business, but only barely so.

The Chia community is much much larger than the number of employees working at Chia Network and the community is all on Keybase. At times Keybase has strained under the load from all the users. The #general channel has something close to 20,000 members last time I checked.

Keybase had one of the few centralized chat apps I didn't hate.

It's all such a shame but I guess that's why I stay away from centralized chat services.

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