I'm giving up on PGP

If your going to start such a service, it needs to be in a country that will respect free speech. And there aren't many.

I think it's the key model that's fundamentally flawed rather than pgp itself, which I believe the author of the article is also asserting.

In cryptography, it is often explained that despite the fact a one-time pad is guaranteed-secure (given various conditions I'm eliding), it is not practical in the vast majority of cases because of a chicken-and-egg problem: How do you distribute the one time pad in the first place? If you do it insecurely, it's a waste of time. If you can do it "securely", why not just use that secure channel to send the message in the first place? OTPs can still be useful because you can establish a secure channel once for a limited duration of time and then use it to temporally shift your security into the future, but that's a relatively rare use case. (That is, the vast bulk of encryption is being used between people who may never have had a "secure" channel between them; think HTTPS here.)

Similarly, PGP's got this significant problem where given that you have the correct keys and that you know you can trust them, it secures your communication quite effectively. But the question is, how do we get to the point where you know that you have the correct keys and you can trust them? Well... that's a hard problem itself. Especially considered over time.

So alternate models must be pursued.

Like the author, I think the Keybase approach is a good idea. In fact I'd even suggest that the idea should be generalized away from "social media accounts" to just "potentially unreliable mechanism" in general. If I have 6 mechanisms for asserting identity on my key, each of which are 95% reliable over the course of a year, then from an absolutist security point of view, that key is still insecure... but assuming even modest independence between the unreliable mechanisms (assuming naive total independence is definitely incorrect, once one is hacked the others are certainly more likely, but neither is it the case that one hack guarantees all others can be hacked), it's still much more secure than nothing at all.

And it also makes sense. A lot of these services are from companies that need to make money. And there isn't much money in the journalists and dissidents who don't have a bespoke solution.