I am sorry if you find it FUD - I do not mean to create any of that. I am asking for clarification from those in the know. I myself do not know. As I mentioned in the original comment / question - it may have something to do with a part of keybase that is not a part of what the original article is about, I don't really understand it.

From where I sit, in my place of knowing very little, I am confused. Some of the keybase things I have read about make it sound like it's almost a perfect fit for so many things I want in the world, then I hear that their chat thing is really great, but has a couple small issues that make is unusable for what I am looking for. I find their identity thing is really awesome, but more centralized and perhaps will at time censor people, and I can't use it. I am confused, and perhaps the brand is tainted from my skewed understanding of the issues, which is why I ask a question, not made some know-it-all statement about how it whatever.

I have not used it. the things I've seen make me think there is really great people making really powerful and great things there, unfortunately some of the businesses I work with could get me removed from their system perhaps, so I am not spending any time trying it out. I have been down that road with google, with vimeo (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20302923 ), facebook, and with so many other things.

Basically I look for things that would not, and preferable could not, ban Larry Flint. If they will ban Larry's posts then I don't need to waste time with it. So far that leaves very few services to actually spend time with.

Again, this is not an attempt to spread and fear or uncertainty or doubt, I would guess that 99% of people will never get banned from keybase (I don't know really, I don't use it, or know if they delete spammers, or alt-right-wrong or whatever either)

Now I'm more confused as your answer mentions they are not supporting Mastadon servers that don't censor porn, hookers, and strippers - so 'not supporting' maybe that's what I should of been asking about, I guess that means they are not banning users, just making it so their user's services can not connect? I don't know, at this point it's already used up so much of my time, I am sorry I asked, not trying to fud anyone else on top of my not understanding.

*edited to add link to vimeo ban explanation, which relates to my questioning, but not directly to keybase.

> Now I'm more confused as your answer mentions they are not supporting Mastadon servers that don't censor porn, hookers, and strippers - so 'not supporting' maybe that's what I should of been asking about, I guess that means they are not banning users, just making it so their user's services can not connect?

Keybase has this concept of Identity Proofs. You put a special signature on a page in a specific way that Keybase has vetted. For example, I can put a signature on my HN about page (which I have), give Keybase my username and they can prove that the HN user is me which proves to other Keybase users that I am real (i.e., not a bot nor a fake profile created for trolling/nefarious purposes). On it's own, my HN proof isn't very strong but coupled with other services and I now have a complex profile of proofs that spreads the social vetting across multiple companies/organizations.

Mastodon is a social messaging platform like twitter mixed with custom message boards of the 90s/00s. The key bit from the latter is that each "instance" is run by anyone on their own hardware with their own level of security determined by whomever administrates the server. Keybase (according to the comments linked above) decided that they would only be setting up this Identity Proofing with the most general instances and not with more specialized topic instances (particularly sex work or porn) because (these are my assumptions wrt their reasoning) there is a time cost to setting this stuff up but also to not align themselves with instances that may be taboo to some of their userbase (read: potential paying clients).

To get to the point: Keybase does not have read access to your content (they use E2E encryption), but they do make certain decisions about how their tools integrate with the outside world. I don't know their politics but I would guess that since they are working towards finding clients to setup custom instances of their model (to start making money), they are just trying to avoid misaligning themselves.

Thank you for explaining this to me. I have read so many great things about keybase, I can tell the people behind it are smart and trying to do more for the world than some 'give me money and data' tech place. Each product / service I have seen mentioned around HN for years seems to be so much of what I have been looking for - but almost / not quite - however I have seen how they would be great for so many others that do not have the censorship issues that I run into.

I wish I could clone the keybase and keybase chat thing and run it federated / uncensored with opt-in group follow moderation. So far it looks like Matrix and Mastadon maybe ipfs / peertube kind of stuff will be the closest things for what I could use comfortably given the increasing censorship and need for mainstream monetization of most projects.

Thanks again for explaining, I was indeed getting confused about the services around them and now I understand a bit better how the pieces fit.