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No, and I am sad about it. Like a lot of people, I stopped using it when the Zoom acquihire was announced. The Keybase backend was never open-sourced and there
by veidr 6y ago
No, and I am sad about it. Like a lot of people, I stopped using it when the Zoom acquihire was announced.
The Keybase backend was never open-sourced and there doesn't seem like a viable path forward for Keybase without the founders.
At the same time, doesn't seem to be any other single solution for the range of things Keybase did.
For secure E2EE chat, I moved to Matrix/Element and it was extremely painful. I am rooting for them, but getting regular people (like my dad and sister) onboarded is super hard. A typical HN reader can probably make it work, and deal with all the bugs and issues, but a "normal" person not so much. The bot story isn't anywhere close to as good as it was with Keybase. Most of my friends can't be bothered to get it set up and working, either.
I really miss Keybase Git, which was a brilliant idea that I haven't seen anybody else do. I set my dad's company up storing their business documents in git backed by Keybase git instead of GitHub. I had to move that git hosting to a server I now have to manage, ugh.
I didn't really use the "secure file sharing between arbitrary people" feature, but I don't know of anything as easy if you did want to do that. I use Syncthing to share sets of files across my own machines, and it works well for that.
The crypto wallet part is well-covered by existing apps. No big loss there.
I really liked Keybase, especially toward the end when the performance problems on mobile with sharing images and basic stuff like that were mostly fixed, and the apps started to show a higher degree of polish.
It is pretty hard to recommend Keybase at this point, though — never fully open sourced, and complete radio silence since the "we've been acquired" blog post. I think it is highly likely that bits will gradually stop working and won't get fixed, and/or Zoom will pull the plug.
(I was afraid that happened the other day, when Keybase Git stopped working and git push operations were failing, but it came back up. Not sure what happened, and AFAIK there was no announcement or anything.)