New Teams Features

https://keybase.io/blog/new-team-features

by tgragnato • 9 years ago

134 18 9 years ago

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 .

malgorithms2• 9 years ago

Actually, heck, to illustrate all this, I just made a team called `hners`, for "anyone who loves Hacker News." It's an open team. You can join straight from my profile in the Keybase app, or by running `keybase team join hners` in your terminal. Come say hi.

[edit: switched to team name hners]

himynameistimli• 9 years ago

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• 9 years ago

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.

regnerba• 9 years ago

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.

mdip3• 9 years ago

It looks like I'm not the only one who visits your blog almost daily in anticipation that a feature as cool as Keybase Filesystem or Encrypted Git gets announced.

While this was an iteration, you nailed a feature I really need with open teams -- I was about to start looking at Slack or Discourse because I'm in need of that right now. And the team management interface will be very pleasant -- I don't have to add people to my private teams often enough that I can ever remember the exact command-line without using "--help" (that's not a knock to your CLI; it's way more intuitive than a lot of the tools I use).

Thanks, so much, for this product and the support that the team provides. I ran into an issue over the summer that affected Windows 10 Insider Fast Channel builds. It ended up being Dokany, not keybase, but your team was as involved as the folks were over there and you were the only Dokany down-stream that provided any help in resolving the problem. Having been in this industry longer than I'd care to admit, I've come to expect that support tends to have no correlation to the price paid for the product, but I fully expect "free" to mean "good luck" (though, paid often means the same thing)[0]. Your team treated it with urgency and was friendly to boot (a characteristic that can be rare in software development but is virtually non-existent in the crypto- space). Love it -- and you have the dubious honor of being the first thing that I install afte I load/reload a Windows / Linux machine/VM.

[0] And couple that with the fact that I was running Insider Preview builds ... I'd have probably thought "well, what did you expect?!"

mathoff2• 9 years ago

Hi malgorithms, I like team "badges". Is it possible somehow to embed my keybase.io profile into my website, e.g. as a widget?

theptip• 9 years ago

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.

sillysaurus3• 9 years ago

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• 9 years ago

Should drop in the next release.

mathoff2• 9 years ago

OTR?

dajohnson89• 9 years ago

Does IRC have the ability to delete messages?

mdip3• 9 years ago

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.

strib2• 9 years ago

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!

mdip3• 9 years ago

How did I miss that announcement?! And I just renewed for the year, ugh! Oh well, I'm cancelling it tomorrow and deleting my data.

It's so inconvenient syncing up an encrypted container[0] with Drive, but the convenience of having a place to store files that I don't have to host myself has kept me on the service... at least until tomorrow.

[0] I'm one of those crazy people who thinks storing a bunch of personal files (almost all of which are videos/photos of my family and none of which would affect my life if they leaked) -- in a non-encrypted, public cloud service is A Bad Idea(tm) and am dismayed that other services don't offer transparent encryption for such things.

cdancette• 9 years ago

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

dullin• 9 years ago

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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