Comment by paulfurley | Hacker News Reader

Comment by paulfurley | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

I'm a user but no expert about keybase. As far as I can tell they've pivoted to taking on Slack & friends with zero-knowledge team-chat, but global. Good luck to them!

We're not in a hurry to try and move people off Slack or GnuPG: teams have their existing services (Slack, G-suite) and other workflows like Thunderbird + Enigmail, git signing etc. We think complementing those existing flows is the way to go.

The longer term vision is that your team can sign up to Fluidkeys, download it and it sets up everyone's email client, git, pass etc according to your team's configuration. Then it quietly keeps everyone's keys updated when people join and leave the team. (and we rotate encryption subkeys every month)

Back to today: 0.3's sending secrets feature is a small diversion from that goal, but we hope a useful feature in its own right :)

I'd love your feedback on the vision above!

> As far as I can tell they've pivoted to taking on Slack & friends with zero-knowledge team-chat, but global.

What? I'm pretty curious what gave you this impression, as I've always seen their chat app as an interesting use built on top of their encrypted file system work, but in no way their primary use-case or business.

We (and everyone else I know that uses Keybase) use it for passing around sensitive information, either through chat, their encrypted Git repos, encrypted messages plopped into emails, etc.

I think Fluidkeys is cool and all, but I definitely wouldn't switch off of Keybase for it, and I think you're doing yourself a disservice by pretending that Keybase is "just another chat app" now and not a direct competitor that also has secure communication built in.

Thanks for pushing back on this.

> We (and everyone else I know that uses Keybase) use it for passing around sensitive information, either through chat, their encrypted Git repos, encrypted messages plopped into emails, etc.

That is interesting. I'm gonna put my hand up and admit I haven't done my homework here. It's been a while since I used it properly and I've relied too heavily on their website:

> Keybase is for anyone. Imagine a Slack for the whole world, except end-to-end encrypted across all your devices. Or a Team Dropbox where the server can't leak your files or be hacked.

> I think Fluidkeys is cool and all, but I definitely wouldn't switch off of Keybase for it,

Thanks, and I wouldn't expect you to have to switch. We're gonna think properly about where we're competing. I appreciate your input.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com