![]() Even Wikipedia - the ultimate example of pooling volunteer time - needs to pay for server hosting fees and for the core MediaWiki full-time developers. Most techies do not care about long-term solutions they believe (sadly, almost invariably wrongly) that they can replace 'money' with 'free time from volunteers' (which is true) to get a project rolling (which is also true), and somehow keep it working, which is a fallacy in most cases - long-term, you have to get a way to start replacing 'free volunteer time' with 'paying for infrastructure, maintenance, and professional full-time employees'. But you need to have them, or else, in the long run, your project will fade out and disappear. Money and time are convertible currencies: you can have either, or better, both. So the first thing to ask, when evaluating whatever solution you're using is, 'where does the money come from?' You don't need just CPU, RAM, storage, Internet connection, and power. This allowed me to develop a skill of 'sniffing out' potential 'suspects' of solutions or frameworks that could not remain endlessly around. You see, I've been part of several startups that failed for a lot of different, unrelated reasons, and I have observed many more. When Keybase was launched, and especially when they started to be over-generous with the amount of encrypted disk space they provided for free - as well as the plethora of tools they scrammed into their Slack/Discord clone (which, IMHO, is nothing to sneer at! - in fact, I have it always on, as opposed to other so-called 'social tools', which eat up way too many resources on my eternally underpowered PowerBook, while providing little benefit in return) - I was a bit worried. That's all commendable, nay, necessary, and I certainly subscribe to such initiatives, wherever they may lead us. It requires innovative new concepts to shift paradigms, abandon the old, embrace the new - but a 'new' that works, is stable enough, provides a solution to an existing problem and/or is cheaper/better/more efficient than existing solutions. Or we'd be still stuck with CLI-only DOS and drool at WordStar and VisiCalc. There is nothing wrong with that rather, those things are crucial for some progress to be made. ![]() That's part of innovation required for having cool tools in an ever-evolving world. Note that I'm all for R&D for new solutions, see what works, see what doesn't evaluate new business opportunities, tweak your business plan, get a solution rolling, join academia and corporate interests in a product/solution/technology and see how far you can take it. ![]() Personally, I don't really care about all that. Any of that will work these days (or even a combination of all of them). If all else fails, there is always crowdsourcing and launching some new cryptocurrency and/or sell a series of badly designed bitmaps as NFTs. None are 'impossible', obviously, not in this era and age: you need a few buzzwords, a few business connections, a bit of luck, a great presentation, and Bob's your uncle. Getting seed capital to keep it going and pay salaries to full-time employees - as opposed to eager volunteers - is another. Getting traction for one's home-cooked new protocol is another thing. Especially if we are aware of past solutions, their weaknesses, their pitfalls, and their long-term threats (such as Keybase's servers going down because 'Zoom wants it so'). Starting something from scratch is not necessarily a Hard Thing To Do. Launching a new federated, Web3, whatever-buzzword-is-trendy-today from scratch is reasonably simple these days there is a lot of code out there, as well as a lot of algorithms, solutions, and even complex mathematical theory behind things such as DAGs, Merkle trees, and whatnot. Those who embraced Keybase (yours truly included) do not want another protocol, another software solution, another Next Best Thingy to install, update, and maintain. While discussing whatever alternatives exist to Keybase is commendable, and I personally enjoy learning about those, I feel that they might distract a bit from the original intention of this feature request (if I may call it that). ![]() I see that the discussion tends to move away from the essential (get an open-source version of the Keybase server) to the marginally significant issues (replacing Keybase by ). ![]()
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