What's the advantage of something like FOKS compared to gnupg or openPGP servers?
this post was submitted on 09 Jul 2025
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My understanding of Keybase is that it was some kind identity aggregator. You were able to link identities not just by keys, but also by external services, like Twitter (at a time), email and other things.
Ah, so the main difference from gnupg and openpgp servers is that it can use other methods than email to identify the owner of a key. Thank you.
Right at the top:
FOKS is like Keybase, but fully open-source and federated, with SSO and YubiKey support.
I guess the reason I am asking is that I have never understood the use-case for Keybase either.
So your answer does not really answer my question. 😀
Is the data and public keys being replicated in the communication between instances? it's not made clear how the federation actually works, because "enabling users on different servers to share data with end-to-end encryption" (from https://foks.pub/) is something all services with TLS / HTTPS support already do...
Also.. one big plus for the OpenPGP HKP protocol is that technically you can self-host your own key in a static HTTPS server with predefined responses and be able to have it interact with other servers and clients without issue. I'm expecting the more complex nature of FOKS might make self-hosting in this way difficult. I'd rather minimize the dynamic services I expose to the outside publicly if I'm self hosting.