Ask HN: Why Keybase?
Along with many others, I did the Keybase identification thingy - adding the key on my Hacker News profile. Do you still use Keybase, how, why — what’s different?
https://keybase.io https://keybase.ioPreviously on HN a few times, here’s a post linking to the source code from 2021 with 135 points, 58 comments:
The idea was great, but half-done.
So I distribute my signature across multiple sites, and use Keybase as the central gathering point of these: The Keybase website will say that the person who runs this GitHub account has the same public key as the person who runs this Twitter account, and so on. So if any of your accounts get hacked, and the public key gets replaced, they'd have to hack all your accounts to replace the public key on all of them. Or just hack your Keybase account, or Keybase itself.
Keybase lacks the decentralized append-only approach that SKS keyservers have.
It provides a single point of failure: Who cares if I distributed my public key across multiple sites, when the single site that mentions where I put them is just an HTML page that anyone with access can edit?
(I should add that the SKS keyservers were poisoned: https://gist.github.com/rjhansen/67ab921ffb4084c865b3618d695... so.)
Not super happy with it as keybase git is super slow, but did not find any alternatives for encrypted git, which is not self-hosted.
Don't use the keyserver, chat or anything else. But the onboarding of new machines is really nice.
The development seemed to have been slowed down since it was acquired by zoom. The iOS app has been updated recently, but it felt abandoned earlier.