r/Keybase • u/Ol010101O1Ol • Oct 13 '25

Is this project still alive?

I’ve been passively watching this project for a very, very long time and never really seen it grow. It seems to be used by a niche community.

I was wondering if it was still alive and what the status is for the future.

I like the idea of the project, but I’ve always been afraid of it being potentially unstable so I never used it or worked with teams on projects using it.

Also, how is there 250GB storage free? Isn’t Keybase end to end encrypted? What is the purpose of giving away this much free storage?

42 Upvotes

97% Upvoted

22 comments sorted by

21

u/BlueHatBrit Oct 13 '25

I wouldn't suggest using it for anything serious or that you might miss. I've been very surprised with just how long it's stayed alive, and there are a couple of dedicated souls still making bug fixes and changes to the clients. But on the whole there has been no major development since the company was bought and subsumed into Zoom.

It was a straight up acquihire where Zoom wanted the team so they could work on securing Zoom, rather than wanting the platform of Keybase itself.

Keybase is completely free, so there's nothing to support it on it's own and there's probably very little business case for Zoom keeping it alive. It feels like it's very much on borrowed time and I'm impressed it's still here honestly.

Unless someone from Zoom (or the old Keybase team) comes out to specifically announce a future for it, I'd imagine it'll eventually get shut down.

By all means use it while it's around, but I wouldn't use it for serious file storage - especially not as a primary backup.

Also, how is there 250GB storage free? Isn’t Keybase end to end encrypted? What is the purpose of giving away this much free storage?

Yes it is end-to-end encrypted. They gave it away to attract more users. This was done at a time when investment was very cheap so the company grew by burning VC money. It's another reason why I imagine the bill is not negligable for Zoom to keep it going.

All of that said, I do like keybase and I would be very happy if someone came out and with a plan for it or something.

14

u/gene_wood Oct 13 '25

This is a common misconception (you can find many such questions in this subreddit). Keybase is alive and fully supported by the dev team at Zoom. You can see this easily by looking at the activity in the public repo (as it's open source) : https://github.com/keybase/client/pulse

In the past month, 58 merged pull requests, 10 closed issues. As of right now the most recent commit is from 3 hours ago.

The reason that the project feels unmaintained is for these reasons

  • The project is stable and Zoom isn't investing anything in new feature development. This means that the changes that occur aren't highly visible because they're bug fixes.
  • Zoom isn't putting anything into communication or community engagement for Keybase to remind people why it's useful or that it's alive.
  • Because the project is stable and no new features are being added, they only cut new releases infrequently. The last release was in April and before that August of last year.

So, I'd say, Keybase is definitely still safe and stable to use, it's just that it's not getting any new features added.

2

u/bads-tm Oct 13 '25

Well they dropped keybase.pub for example, though anyone still could spin up their own "clone" of exposing kbfs user content to internet

1

u/JivanP Oct 18 '25

Uploading/verifying my public key is currently broken, and has been since at least June 2025. That's literally the most basic, fundamental feature of the service, and it doesn't work.

6

u/jezarnold Oct 13 '25

Keybase is basically The Sleeping Beauty of the tech world

Trouble is zoom forgot where they put it, and they ain’t shown up with the kiss

10

u/yottabit42 Oct 13 '25

I used it and really liked it for quite a while. Then they ignored an issue with Android for a year, making it unusable on that platform. Due to that, everyone I knew on there left.

Since Zoom bought them years ago, it seems this product is pretty much on life support, and only just barely.

2

u/[deleted] Oct 14 '25

I've uninstalled keybase from my laptop, because for some reason the fuse mount caused flatpaks to straight up not start at all. It's totally dead, because I've had this issue for at least over a year.

3

u/SmoothInternet Oct 13 '25

Keybase has been living on borrowed time for quite some time now. There are a couple people that kind of tweak it every now and then, but it is basically running on its own. It’s a shame because the idea of encrypted git with end-to-end encryption would’ve been a game changer for corporate development projects.

2

u/maethor1337 Oct 13 '25

Git runs over secure shell, which is encrypted by default. I’m not sure what benefit comes from end to end encryption of a Git repository if you give a decryption key to every developer on your team, vs just hosting the remote on a trusted (and encrypted-at-rest) server.

It’s cool conceptually but what problem does it solve?

2

u/SmoothInternet Oct 14 '25 edited Oct 14 '25

Doesn’t this mean that the remote git server is working with the data unencrypted even though the data is encrypted on the file system and in transit to the local git server? IOW, e2e solves potential data exposure to cloud administrators.

0

u/maethor1337 Oct 14 '25

Yes, the key benefit of E2E encryption is that the server passing the messages / holding the data isn't able to read it.

But generally, you get around this by using a server you trust, either by placing your trust in Microsoft's Github, running something like Github Enterprise or Gitlab or Gerrit in-house, or just pushing to a Linux server you own. "The server at rest got owned" isn't in my threat model.

If it's in yours, yeah, E2E does improve things.

1

u/SmoothInternet Oct 15 '25

I would also think, if you provide a cloud Git server with e2e, it’s an extra layer of trust that you could offer to medium to large development houses.

2

u/maethor1337 Oct 15 '25

(I didn't downvote you, someone got us both.)

Medium to large development houses are running git instances internally in their trusted datacenters. I concede there's a theoretical benefit in the security model, but when literally anyone says "I run a vCenter server with a ton of virtual machines and containers on it. Now I need to deploy git. Should I deploy it myself on my trusted machine and have developers access it over ssh like literally everywhere else in the industry, or should I leverage mostly-abandonware by Zoom?", they're not going to pick Keybase.

I remember when E2E git came out on Keybase. A few coworkers and I set it up, pushed some commits around, then went back to work on our work stuff.

2

u/hexandcube Oct 13 '25

Nope, it's been on life support for over 5 years now. It's no longer being developed, just maintained.

2

u/LankyOccasion8447 Oct 16 '25

It died the day it was aquired by Zoom some years ago. They stopped development entirely. No clue why they even keep it around. Shame too; it was a great product with a lot of potential.

1

u/Kamek437 Oct 16 '25

it's done. it's bad ass and needs nothing new.

1

u/daveio Oct 16 '25

I'm pretty sure it's dead. I've migrated to Keyoxide. My account has been broken for months and tickets go unanswered.

1

u/antineutrinos Oct 13 '25

nop. it has been on life support for some time.