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Comment by souterrain | Hacker News Reader

Keybase seems to be enjoying an identity crisis. On one hand, it’s a tool that makes a lot of sense for team collaboration, particularly with its low-effort encrypted git implementation. I even know a couple teams doing software development for the US government using Keybase for collaboration.

On the other hand, the Stellar (cryptocurrency) wallet and the “feature” referenced in this article are something... else. Granted, Keybase is $0/month per user currently, so it’s no surprise it is the founders’ personal sandbox for experimentation.

I thought Keybase were on the right track in the past with their feature conservatism. Now, not so much.

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Feature conservatism has never been Keybase; their identity crisis has been going on for quite some time. What first started as a simple messaging app became a file-sharing service, then a Slack competitor, and now a cryptocurrency wallet.

Adding a simple toggle to block unsolicited messages doesn't sound like too much in that respect.

All messengers do this. They start out good and add features until they are bloated junk. It's a law of nature dating back to the 90s.

To me, it first started out as a key sharing and identity verification service.

That was quite useful to me.

Then they pivoted to a chat app. I had no need for yet another chat app.

Then lately this messy cryptocurrency integration which so far just seems shady.

I am not sure Keybase provides to me any value anymore.

>Then lately this messy cryptocurrency integration which so far just seems shady.

Stellar is actually pretty legit and is backed by a real organization going back to 2014: https://www.stellar.org/foundation

As far as Keybase is concerned, I can't complain when a company sends me free money every month—I'm up to about $60 USD now and there’s another airdrop next week.

I think we're just at the beginning of the integration of messaging clients + digital currency—you know if Facebook’s Libra gets off the ground, people will be using Facebook Messenger to send it around.

I feel like the #1 thing they ought to be doing is opening it up as a platform.

I think their original mission was: build a better keyring. They've done that, it works great! But the idea that they will follow that up by building a chat app better than Slack or Teams seems like hubris, akin to trying to win two roulette spins in a row.

If, OTOH, they opened up KB as a platform, I'm not sure what exactly would happen, but it could be pretty cool. It's not hard to imagine, say, a distributed social media app built on exposing a feed of files your KB friends have posted in their public KBFS, or indie game devs using Keybase as a cheap and fast way to add authentication and in-game chat to their games. I'm not sure how they would monetize that exactly, but it seems like a better problem to have than "let's beat Slack and Teams with five developers and a several-years-late-start".

It's not that hard to beat Slack and Teams.

IRC + viewing history + image preview + 99% uptime + lighter client gets you there, anything else is icing on the cake.

Well that's of course in terms of features an duser experience, but these don't ensure your product actually wins in the market.

You don't need to win the market if the market has billions of users. Keybase has a few million users, doesn't it? Get 40% of that to use it, and you win.

And the ability to view multiple channels / chats at the same time, please, for the love of productivity.

How has this been omitted for so long? I used to be able to have multiple IRC channels open at the same time. Now, gotta switch back and forth on that slow Slack UI.

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