Keybase App

After a period of being "invitation only," anyone can now join Keybase and strengthen its web of trust.

Keybase.io is an online and proprietary service that differs from other services in important ways. Firstly, its primary objective is to help make secure encrypted communication between people easier to achieve; secondly, all the tools it uses to accomplish this goal are open source. It accomplishes the first part by being a proprietary service as it attempts to build a web of trust between its members. To do this, when you sign up with Keybase.io, you verify your identification against your own GnuPG key signature and a variety of online services that in theory only you can prove. These include Facebook, Twitter, GitHub, cryptocurrency addresses, and your own web domains.

With these proofs in place, other users can verify your identity with some certainty, which only becomes stronger as more choose to "follow" you, just as you might with friends in real life, or meet to share keys. This web of trust is going to be difficult to usurp, especially when taking the social element into account. It means that anyone can download your public key from Keybase and send you a message that only you can decrypt with more confidence than if they downloaded your public key from a random keyserver.

To help with all of this, and in an attempt to expand on its services to include trusted communication within teams, Keybase.io offers Linux users both a desktop application and a command-line interface. These tools allow you to update your keys from your local GnuPG installation, add new trusted devices (even from the command line, which features its own QR code generator), list followers, and send messages. The GUI chat is particularly powerful because it uses your contacts' respective GnuPG keys to ensure communication is end-to-end encrypted, a little like Telegram with more trust.

Project Website

https://keybase.io/

After a period of being "invitation only," anyone can now join Keybase and strengthen its web of trust.

Matrix client

Fractal

Matrix is a wonderful idea. It's a federated communication platform that provides a way to chat in groups or with one another without having to use one single server or portal. It works, and it's already very popular. Because it's open source and the APIs are well documented, you can find many different clients, from the web portal to Android. Fractal is a Gnome client for Matrix, hoping to bring the combined communication convenience to the world's most popular desktop. It can be installed from a Flatpak or with a manual build. It's built on Rust, which means building it yourself may be slightly different from what you're accustomed. It also helps if you have an account at matrix.org before running the application. With credentials added, the main window is much as you'd expect. Rooms and contacts are listed on the left, with the main chat window on the right. The chat window currently supports nearly all the media supported by Matrix (text, images, video, and audio) with the exception of notices and location. Decoration is minimal, in line with Gnome's aesthetic, but it feels much sharper and more modern than the riot.im web portal to the same chat services and its associated Android app.

You can add groups and contacts from the titlebar, and favorite rooms and people can be listed separately for easy access. The conversation is listed exactly as you'd expect, and there are buttons for easily uploading files or for adding emoji. It does everything you want with the exception of end-to-end encryption. This is planned for a future release but has no timeline, so it may be something to watch out for if security is important outside of the public channels you join; however, Fractal is still an excellent option for group chat.

Project Website

https://gitlab.gnome.org/World/fractal

Chat to anyone without a central server thanks to Matrix.org and this excellent Gnome client.