New Teams Features

Oh cool - wasn't really expecting to see this one on HN! The changes here are all a result of "iterating" on our product. Since we work in cryptography, it's not usually the case we can move fast. But this mini-blog post outlined some quick changes we could make.

Stuff we learned from testers:

(1) In many ways, Keybase's chat is like Slack (except encrypted!), but unlike Slack, our user database is public and connected to known identities. So there was an opportunity we were missing, namely to teach people about teams they might be interested in, run by people they are interested in. Seems obvious now, but we had our blinders on.

(2) A large "open" team still makes sense on Keybase, even though anyone is allowed in. It's worthwhile because sender authenticity is extremely valuable. Protection from phishing attacks has been driving a lot of our team signups/migrations...especially in the cryptocurrency space.

If there are any technical questions about these changes or how teams work on Keybase, happy to answer them here. As you can tell from my HN profile, it can be proven I'm keybase.io/chris .

A little off topic but have there been any improvements to the chat experience itself? I tried pushing some of my team to use the chat a few months back but to be honest, the time it took to view and reply messages on iOS was too long and overall reliability was hit or miss.

Not to say your other features aren't great, we are testing out using private git repos for some of our non-essential keys and so far no problem.

Any chance notifications on Android will be grouped anytime soon? I had to uninstall the app as it just got to crazy showing all the notifications for messages.

Should drop in the next release.

Oh, man I love this product. I was an evangelist for it back when it required invites and was only useful for storing GPG keys and linking them to your social media accounts. Then keybase filesystem came along and I thought "well, surely I can get a few other folks to join". Sadly, no interest outside of a few invites I gave away on HN. Encrypted Git, however, was the killer app that got the last holdouts among my close network to join.

The git thing solves a few problems for me. I have most of my private repos on BitBucket's free tier and they've grown to the point where I had to make the decision to move to another service or pony up a few bucks a month to add users to a private dev repo for an open source tool I haven't released the code to yet. I'm making no money on it so the desire to plunk down cash for that is not something I'm interested in. Encryption backing it all is icing on the cake considering I only really care about limited access control (and if the code leaked, oh well!). I've now moved all of those repos over to keybase[0]

Team management has been the only real "hassle" and it's only been a hassle because I'm not dealing with a large enough team to commit the CLI commands to memory. And open teams was exactly the feature I was looking for with something I'm going to be doing next week or so[1].

The only thing I wish they offered was some way to pay for premium services. The thing is, I don't even need the premium services. I'm using almost none of the space quota on Keybase Filesystem[2], and they give you so much git space that I can't see ever hitting that wall with personal projects. I just want a way to add revenue to a product that I love out of fear that it'll vanish due to the usual financial pressures[3].

[0] I still keep a backup on my home server just in case.

[1] I'm not being cryptic on purpose -- I have a small group of people I'm working with on some improvements to an ethash CUDA miner to add some additional efficiencies and currently have a core group team (with one very green CUDA developer [that's me]) for that but wanted a open-invite team to invite others into. I don't have slack/discord or other chat clients installed on my personal dev machine but had planned on going that route or similar since I couldn't do it all in keybase. Plus ... crypto-currency, crypto-chat ... it fits better.

[2] Though, I would ditch my Google Drive subscription if I could purchase 100GB or so of storage. I prefer the way Keybase Filesystem works in Windows and Linux and that the files can just be linked to when they're in your "public" folder. It's super-convenient for cases where I have a system that I can't install the client but want to curl a few scripts of mine.

[3] I recall reading something about the company being well funded and the founders were founders of OKCupid, so perhaps they're in such good shape that financial pressure is far from setting in, but this tool has become the second thing I install after I set up an OS. I'm happy to pay even without getting any additional, needed, functionality. It's a small way that I can invest in a product that provides great, personal, value.