The current ecosystem out there in the Internet is not one that wants for communication nor security. Not at least in options for either, but rather in the popularity contest between the oldest forms of communication on the Internet versus all these new ways of communicating out there. There are so many ways!
Email and web-based sites like Reddit and Facebook have all proven themselves over and over again, perhaps not quite as secure as any of us would hope, but in uniquity of use. Everyone had to get over the hump of everyone they knew having an email address or a Facebook account. Once the novelty wore off, the security headaches appeared. Most notably how difficult it is to get people to adopt basic security methods when dealing with email, the death and burial of PGP and GPG technologies rendering email plaintext for anyone to snoop on who might have access to do so.
Then the parade of other sorts of solutions exploded. Signal, WhatsApp, Snapchat, Telegram, and Facebook Messenger exploded. People talking to each other, sometimes privately, sometimes not. Facebook ate a little bit of Signal, but so far I haven’t seen anyone actually use it to protect their chats.
Recently I have come across another app like this, called Confide. It brings forward a lot of the features that attract me to things like Signal and Telegram, the end-to-end security between chat partners without worrying about anyone in between eavesdropping. Confide also eliminates a huge privacy hole present in Snapchat, which is Confide appears to have eliminated the possibility of screen shotting the content of the message so it can break out. This obviously has limits, because you can very well take camera-based pictures of the Confide process and eliminate the screen-shot security, but it does push that envelope further out where people have to perform a lot of extra steps to be clever.
Signal was the first app that I saw that introduced exploding messages to this marketplace. Within the Signal app, and Confide as well I presume, you can set a lifetime counter to a message and after the timer has expired, the message is irretreivable.
There were other solutions that came along as well, more colaborative and team-based, like Slack and Discord, services that supplanted text messages like SMS and iMessage for me, especially at work. The further along I went, the more I realized that for a lot of these systems they unfortunately have two big things running against them, they are a change in how people communicate and change is one of the scariest things out there; the second thing is just how oddly resistant people are to actually collaborate. Quite often I am struck by the dial tone I get from folk when I attempt to explain why collaborative solutions like Google Docs and Slack/Discord are so amazing. So I pretty much make an elevator pitch and then let things lie where they land.
Enter Keybase. Originally the site appeared to be a central hub to link personal identity and personal avatars to PGP/GPG keypairs. I suppose you could affectionately regard it as trying to plug in Frankenstein’s Monster just to get a few more twitches out of the poor bastard. However just today, I received an email inviting me to check out Keybase again. They have teams, chat, files, and exploding bits that seem to mingle elements of Signal and Slack together.
What platform wins? Winning is population. When everyone collectively agrees that a solution is so good that it wins by sheer existence alone, that platform wins. Facebook tried it by manipulating human emotions and reward centers, and monetizing all our data that we wanted to share with each other. Right now the platform du jour is Facebook and the corruption of that system is starting to exact a toll on the people who use it. I have abandoned Facebook, and my life has improved. I don’t have the social reward mechanism in place any longer, but it has given me more time to read books and articles online and helped me become a happier person.
What then for these other applications and what they have to bring to the party? I have almost all of them, but use them all very sparingly. What is the point of a communications platform if you don’t know anybody who is using it? It’s the lesson learned by Google Plus in how it attempted to fight with Facebook. If the people aren’t there, then nobody is there. There is a reflection of this all the way back to the start of email as a communications mechanism. PGP/GPG was released back in the late 90’s, and because it didn’t take off, it spiraled out of control and went pear-shaped when it crashed to the surface.
Only time will tell, but from what I’ve seen of Keybase, I’m pleased and intrigued. However again, without anyone to actually use this platform with, it’s just another app that I don’t use on my phone or computer.