
New Teams Features - tgragnato
https://keybase.io/blog/new-team-features
======
malgorithms
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 .

~~~
himynameistimli
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.

~~~
stingraycharles
I second this. I have tried to move chats with some of my more technical
friends to Keybase, but after a few months we all came to the conclusion it
was not reliable. Messages not being delivered without any visual feedback,
messages received out of order hours late, etc.

I like the fact that keybase has a lot more functionality, but because of
these issues in their core product I had to switch to Signal.

------
theptip
Love the UX and feature-set of Keybase, this product keeps getting better.
Kudos to the team!

Still need to see a security audit before I would consider using Keybase for
my company's hazmat/key material though.

------
dullin
I'm trying to find the feature set compared to slack (since they are trying to
put it against it) but can't seem to find it on their site or anywhere ... ?

I can see that this is newer so it's probably not feature complete. Do they
have webhooks? Calls? Screen sharing?

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mdip
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.

~~~
strib
> Though, I would ditch my Google Drive subscription if I could purchase 100GB
> or so of storage.

These days every Keybase account has 250 GB of free storage. Check it out!

~~~
cdancette
I can't find the announcement of this, or any mention of this in the keybase
app. Where did you see this ?

~~~
strib
We didn't announce it anywhere, we just rolled it out quietly.

------
sillysaurus3
Dear keybase,

Please let us delete chat messages.

Every chat program has this ability except Keybase.

Besides that, your service is awesome. Keep it up!

~~~
maxtaco
Should drop in the next release.

~~~
mathoff
OTR?

