Comment by AtlasBarfed

15 days ago

I wish they'd buy the carcass of Keybase from Zoom.

It seems very similar to Tailscale: immense utility from a free-tier product for the general public, which leads to trust and a large enterprise market.

Wow, that’s a great idea! I loved keybase back in the day and really thought it solved a real world problem in a unique and interesting way. Then Zoom bought it (for some reason) and left it to rot.

  • You might already know and used "for some reason" as sarcasm. For those that do not: Zoom did the usual aqui-hire. They needed to show their enterprise customers they were taking e2e encryption seriously, so they bought out the guys who did exactly that kind of encryption with Keybase.

    A shame really, because Keybase was kind of unique in the way the facilitated social proof of identity tied to cryptographic keys. A shame though that they never found a really sustainable business model. When they turned to crypto currency towards the end of their independent run I knew it probably wouldn't last.

    • the UX was so terrible that it was inevitable it won't stick. It was clunky and alien on every productivity platform, I attempted to work in a team leveraging it, and it was painful on windows and macos alike.

      I just deleted it as I noticed it was responsible of about 30% of active cpu (and battery drain) usage on my mac, while being logged out due to inactivity. Honestly: I never particularly liked it, and I could not feel the concept especially tempting, just went with the team.

Why would enterprises need Keybase's product?

  • We used it for dozens of things back at my old job. Send each other passwords. Informal credentials store fo one off projects and non production. Sensitive project documentation

    • Aren't there already lots of products that offer that, often more integrated with enterprises' existing systems than Keybase would be?