Sending an encrypted message to someone is a problem solved for decades: get their public key, encrypt your message, send it. The real problem with encrypted c

Sending an encrypted message to someone is a problem solved for decades: get their public key, encrypt your message, send it. The real problem with encrypted communications is: how do you properly distribute public keys, make sure they receive it, they receive the right one, etc ? - giving them by hand, directly or through web of trust, doesn't scale - trusting a server involves... trusting it, which you might not be able to do for many reasons - use the first one you receive from your recipient (TOFU) kinda works, but it's not really enough The beginning of a solution here is general transparency for everyone: everyone sends their public key to everyone, everyone records everything, and so if someone else changes my key without my consent I can tell everyone "SOMETHING IS WRONG, THIS IS NOT ME". For scalability, of course, keys aren't sent to everyone. The nice thing with this is that by design you don't need to trust anyone, you just have to watch everything by yourself. Keybase still needs to trust all third-party services, although it's assuming that each one isn't super reliable and the real trust comes from multiple independent third-parties. It's slightly in the middle, with the advantage of reusing existing stuff, but the inconvenient of making said existing stuff more important What's the relationship with the fediverse ? None, really; the concept is generic for any kind of communication, but ActivityPub is slowly becoming a protocol for generic communication anyway so might as well do it for AP.