Zoom has acquired Keybase. It’s hard to imagine that it will continue in anything much like its current iteration. I will miss it. (Except for the weird cryptocurrency thing they were pushing for a few months.) I haven’t found anything I like nearly as well for end-to-end encrypted chat. And their filesystem/git features were a great way to carry around things like dotfiles that were both small and ran a significant risk of accidentally getting something sensitive checked in.

They state outright that this is an acqui-hire and that the team will be working on Zoom’s main product:

Initially, our single top priority is helping to make Zoom even more secure. There are no specific plans for the Keybase app yet. Ultimately Keybase’s future is in Zoom’s hands, and we’ll see where that takes us. Of course, if anything changes about Keybase’s availability, our users will get plenty of notice.

So, our shortest-term directive is to significantly improve our security effectiveness, by working on a product that’s that much bigger than Keybase. We can’t be more specific than that, because we’re just diving in.

Congratulations to the Keybase team on this big news. And I’m happy to see Zoom getting serious about improving the security of their platform.

I will be sorry to see the Keybase product go away or be neglected; it’s one of my favorite communications tools. Here’s hoping it finds a good home.

I’m trying on Kev Quirk’s “100 Days To Offload” idea. You can see details and join yourself by visiting 100daystooffload.com.