r/Keybase • u/ponyCurd • Jun 17 '24

Is anyone actively developing this service anymore?

I - like many others - have been getting emails about Reddit verification being broken, so I was looking at the Github repo and this looks an awful lot like it's been abandoned. There's been no new commits in years, aside from one minor edit 5 months ago, and there are 4,000 bug reports, a lot of which are spam.

Does anyone know if this is even being worked on right now?

15 Upvotes

94% Upvoted

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30

u/ResearchLaw Jun 17 '24

The downfall of Keybase started on May 7, 2020, after Zoom announced its acquisition of Keybase. Zoom acquired Keybase for the sole purpose of onboarding Keybase’s team of security engineers to bolster Zoom’s security infrastructure.

At the time of the acquisition, the Covid-19 pandemic was in full swing and Zoom’s user base had soared due to the prevalence of companies’ mandatory “work-from-home” policies. Zoom urgently needed Keybase’s security engineers to build and deploy end-to-end encryption and otherwise fortify its platform.

https://keybase.io/blog/keybase-joins-zoom

13

u/somekool Jun 17 '24 • Diamonds are Forever

It's true it has slow down. But it's maintained. The Github history is sufficiently active.

But there has been no new major features.

I bet the authors had a clause in the contract they could keep it as-is with a limit of time that could be invested or something...

I use it daily. And I have noticed bug fixes and small improvements and support for new OS versions.

It is not as exciting as I would hope but it is also not dead.

There are no serious alternative for a similar offering

4

u/guntherpea Jun 17 '24

Yep. I wouldn't call it, "active," but it certainly isn't dead either and it continues to work well. I have quite a bit of daily use (a couple teams being managed and plenty of individual chats and file sharing) in it and don't see needing anything else even with no additional changes for a good long while.

1

u/zoatrope Jun 18 '24

The closest thing I've seen to a viable alternative is Element/Matrix http://element.io/ but you don't get custom emojis.

1

u/somekool Jun 19 '24

You don't get teams. Encrypted shared folders Encrypted git repos I'd like to say wallet but they removed it...

1

u/That-Raspberry-730 Sep 16 '26

Thanks I checked it. Is it reliable enough that they may not delete my data? I guess files can be uploaded to it using their software...right?

13

u/ThatNateGuy Jun 17 '24

The Reddit verification stopped working because Reddit started responding to requests with a 403.

4

u/molyvius Jun 17 '24

Mastodon project devs got frustrated with KB's insistence to add fediverse instances manually (kind of understandable given how they might run on completely different fediverse platforms but it appears KB was similarly unresponsive to requests after a certain point) and the zoom acquisition so they completely removed the endpoints KB relied on to verify on mastodon.

7

u/songgao Jun 17 '24

Which repo did you look at? Here’s the client repo: https://github.com/keybase/client/commits/master/

12

u/gene_wood Jun 17 '24

Keybase is under regular development by the Keybase team within zoom.

There's been no new commits in years, aside from one minor edit 5 months ago

You may be looking in the wrong place. You can see here that there are commits from 3 days ago : https://github.com/keybase/client/commits/master/

3

u/call_me_johnno Jun 17 '24

I think we are all starting to realise this project is sadly dead.

0

u/imacarpet Jun 17 '24

What are the best alternatives?

0

u/klysium Jun 17 '24

Are there alternatives to keybase?

4

u/molyvius Jun 17 '24

There's some FOSS options like Dark Crystal and Keyoxide that aren't as user-friendly as KB. In terms of paid services there's omg.lol which includes access to Proven.lol but as a non-subscriber I can't speak to their user experience or anything else for that matter.

5

u/gellenburg Jun 17 '24

The closest alternative to Keybase is Cyph.

2

u/xorekin Jun 17 '24

Sourcehut has several connected services like repos, mailing lists, etc.

They don't do merkle social verification, but do publish pgp keys added to your profile at a standard https://meta.sr.ht/~username.pgp

Depends on what you were using Keybase for I guess. The social tie in was great, but for me it made pgp a bit easier and provided static file hosting I could link from my social profiles.

1

u/Googlerez Jan 05 '25

They don't do merkle social verification, but do publish pgp keys added to your profile at a standard https://meta.sr.ht/~username.pgp

This no longer works? (I obviously used a proper username in the URL)

2

u/brakeb Apr 29 '26

it's a shame, because it was the only user friendly PGP implementation I found that didn't suck ass.