I don't think it's distributed in the IPFS fashion, right?
Which makes sense, of course, since Keybase is a funded startup that needs to capture value... and, well, centralized file sharing is a more straightforward solution, too.
The file system thing seems really cool and useful. I'm a fan of Keybase and will recommend this to people with whom I need to share sensitive data.
It'd be interesting to hear the Keybase people talk openly about how they see their role as both infrastructure providers for an open web of trust, and an economic entity that requires for its survival some degree of lock-in and centralization.
IPFS alone is usable for the public web, but is not usable for private sharing. You need a social identity-oriented public key infrastructure with a good UI. That is Keybase, and it's incredible that we have this now. Sure, we should implement an IPFS backend for the storage part. But let's not neglect the huge progress the Keybase folks have given us.
Well, what I'm hoping for from Keybase is enough user friendly tooling to encourage a lot of people to start using public-key cryptography. I don't see IPFS as really addressing any of that, even though it is extremely cool and valuable in other ways.
I love the ideas behind IPFS, but it isn't even trying to solve the same problems as KeyBase, so comparing them like this is very silly. Users may be able to benefit from both in different ways, or even use parts of the two together in the future.
I'm not speaking for Keybase, but their approach so far is to fill these roles in compatible ways.
As an infrastructure provider, they open source the client software and design it to trust the server as little as possible. They also endeavor to document the behavior of the server so that, in theory, you could build your own Keybase-compatible server.
As an economic entity, they're positioned to tackle the issues that open source projects usually face, like support, development resources, UI design resources, and "where do you put all of this encrypted data" by getting their most needy users (mostly businesses) to pay them.
Which makes sense, of course, since Keybase is a funded startup that needs to capture value... and, well, centralized file sharing is a more straightforward solution, too.
The file system thing seems really cool and useful. I'm a fan of Keybase and will recommend this to people with whom I need to share sensitive data.
It'd be interesting to hear the Keybase people talk openly about how they see their role as both infrastructure providers for an open web of trust, and an economic entity that requires for its survival some degree of lock-in and centralization.