Keybase Sites

» see keybase.pub as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the last words ~

Keybase spent its first years solving a narrow problem well: proving that the person holding a public key was the same person holding a given Twitter account or GitHub login. Around that it grew an encrypted filesystem, KBFS, which gave every user a private directory and a public one. Keybase Sites was the obvious consequence. Anything you dropped in your public folder became a web page at yourname.keybase.pub, and if you pointed a domain at it, that worked too.

The implementation was deliberately unambitious, and the people who built it said so: a proxy in front of /public/USERNAME with a Markdown renderer stapled to the output, specifically the Node package marked running in GitHub-flavored mode. No build step and no dashboard. You moved a file into a folder on your own machine and the file was on the internet.

The host turns up in the archive in March 2016 and the page title never changed: "Keybase.pub, Browse public files in KBFS". Hidden in the markup, where only somebody reading source would find it, sat a line the developers left for each other. "Should the machines arise, KBFS is where I'll hide."

~ the record ~

~ what it actually was ~

Free static hosting has existed since GeoCities. What Keybase added was that the publishing surface and the identity layer had become the same object. The folder that proved who you were also served your pages, which meant a Keybase site carried a cryptographic claim about its author without the author doing anything at all. Nothing before it had quite made authorship a property of the filesystem.

This was a product with a specific assumption about its user, which is that you already cared about signing keys before you arrived. I am an engineer and this sat squarely inside my field, and I still never kept anything there. Keybase asked for a level of key hygiene that most working engineers admire in principle and skip in practice, and that is a smaller audience than 400,000 accounts makes it sound.

~ what replaced it ~

Zoom announced the acquisition on 7 May 2020, during the stretch of that year when Zoom was buying its way out of a security reputation. Keybase then went into a drawer. Commit activity on the client thinned out, and users spent three years watching a product that technically still worked.

The hosting went on 1 March 2023. The front-end shell outlived the feature by at least a day, since the archive's final capture of keybase.pub is from 2 March and still renders the normal page, which is the ordinary way a web app dies: the building is emptied while the sign stays lit. The public folders themselves did not vanish, and anyone running the Keybase client can still read them. Only the part that made them visible to everyone else was switched off.

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