Keybase

Keybase
Keybase home page as seen on June 3, 2020
URL	https://keybase.io/
Status	Endangered
Archiving status	Not saved yet
Archiving type	Unknown
IRC channel	#archiveteam-bs (on hackint)

Keybase is a public key directory that allows bi-directionally linking public keys to social media accounts. This is done with proofs to verify the account actually belongs to a given user. Further features include chat, a file system with public and private contents, and private Git repository hosting. While the client is open-source, the server is not. Keybase was launched 2014-02-14 and had 407,163 users as of 2019-08-22.

Archiving

There's a signed merkle tree that serves as a public audit log to prevent tampering. This tree could potentially be traversed to replicate the database. Relevant API endpoints are:

 https://keybase.io/_/api/1.0/merkle/root.json
 https://keybase.io/_/api/1.0/merkle/block.json?hash=77f89c806fe0f896

Documentation is located here:

 https://keybase.io/docs/api/1.0/call/merkle/root
 https://keybase.io/docs/api/1.0/call/merkle/block

A retrieval of the current merkle tree as of March 2023 along with all users referenced therein can be found at keybase.io_user_discovery_202303. The item also contains a recursive crawl of followers and following users starting from chris^{[IA•Wcite•.today•MemWeb]}. Extracted user lists are available at https://transfer.archivete.am/pAz0P/keybase-users-from-merkle-tree.zst^{[IA•Wcite•.today•MemWeb]} and https://transfer.archivete.am/Xq9cY/keybase-users-from-chris-followers-recursion.zst^{[IA•Wcite•.today•MemWeb]}, respectively.

Keybase Sites

Until 2023, Keybase allowed for hosting static websites under keybase.pub subdomains or custom domains through the Keybase Sites feature. This service was a simple proxy for accessing the /public/USERNAME directory on the Keybase File System with a Markdown renderer (specifically, the Node.js marked package in gfm mode). It was shut down on 2023-03-01.

Vital Signs

• On 2020-05-07 Keybase announced they've been acquired by Zoom[1]. Commit activity on the client has significantly dried down since, signalling that the project has gone into maintenance mode.