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Comment by soulofmischief | Hacker News Reader

All of these complaints in the comments... Not realizing the diplomacy probably involved in keybase.pub being the only real hit Keybase takes in this round of layoffs. I would take this as a glimmer of hope that the folk at Zoom still appreciate Keybase for the same reason they bought it.

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Isn't Keybase pretty much a dead man walking now? Their android app hasn't been updated in 8 months (shortly after the acquisition) even though it had some showstopping bugs like crashes/hangs when typing indicators are enabled

Last week I installed an app that had its last update 6 years ago. Does exactly what it should, no complaints.

8 months is not a problem, at least if the software isn't super complex and has a ton of bugs (both recently introduced and there since forever) and missing critical features (such as end to end encryption verification, the whole reason they exist). I'm sure it's a coincidence that no updates came out anymore after Zoom took over the team.

Anyway, without sarcasm, I don't use Keybase anymore but age isn't really the metric by which I define a dead app walking...

My concern with Keybase isn't solely that updates have slowed down, it's that the app has been broken on Android 13 since it came out.

Based on their github issues and PRs, it looks like all they have to do to fix it is upgrade their version of react. The fact that they haven't done that yet is what tells me the app is dead.

A friend of mine called in a pretty serious bug[0] post-Zoom acquisition and they jumped right on it, so they at least have clearance to handle security issues.

[0] https://johnjhacking.com/blog/cve-2021-23827/

> Zoom still appreciate Keybase for the same reason they bought it

Didnt they buy it to ick it up with some dirty form of surveillance capitalism?

No. Zoom bought the company during the pandemic -- after a period of being criticized for their security practices -- to beef up their security engineering team. (I worked with several Keybase members when they worked at OkCupid, and later worked on projects with Keybase.)

It's inspiring to hear about teams who follow each other from project to project. That is what software development is about: collaborating with others to build cool stuff.

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