Keybase had good concept originally and they even had some momentum for a sec, but then they took VC money and imploded. Considering how simple system it was, I feel it should be something we could implement again (without spof)
Thread with comments announcing it: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44520419
(I'm also not keen to follow Max to another project... they fucked up OKCupid pretty badly, and Keybase never actually had a business model, with predictable results, so I have to imagine FOKS is going to get enshittified somehow as well.)
I will say there are downsides to cryptographic keys being required for updating a package: One of the biggest pain points we have in Sandstorm is we both verify authors using their PGP key (from Keybase, as it happens, it's an old project), and we have a keypair for each app which you need to update it.
The end result unfortunately is sometimes we have trivial one-line fixes for apps which are abandoned by the author, and it is very difficult to deploy said fix to end users. This can hypothetically manifest in the form of unfixable security problems. We do have a way to forcibly change the key, but it's intentionally a pain to do, and of course, is possible because ultimately the central authority has the ability to code the platform to circumvent that key anyways.
Which is to say, you do trade some security risks for other security risks, whether it's a better situation is an exercise for the reader.
My understanding is that they were acqui-hired by Zoom - probably for optics reasons, since Zoom was having a series of high-profile security incidents around then. Keybase development basically came to a standstill at that point, probably because the team got pulled away to work on Zoom projects.
A less aggressively funded business might have limped on essentially forever with the base product.
I've personally worked at a startup that forcibly ejected its founders. It happens.
(The startup got sold for scraps about 6 months later. The service I personally worked on kept streaming video for about a year with zero maintenance, only failing when the hardware was physically powered off. This was well after the main database had collapsed, and the web UI was inoperable, while iframe embeds kept chugging along.)
Plenty of "founders" decide to sell out rather than follow their original vision no matter what. It's not even necessarily the wrong thing to do. But the prospect of a liquidity event can turn an idealist's head quickly.