Flowdock vs Keybase Teams

Keybase is a powerful and secure team-organizing software. And because Keybase is so transparently good at what it does, Keybase is a foundational software that facilitates the future of work: effective, inclusive, secure Remote Teams.

Keybase is a free, end-to-end encrypted, open-source program with almost limitless flexibility. Each Keybase user or team is a unique cryptographic identity. Each message or interaction that a user has with a team or other user, is verifiable and digitally-signed. Custom combinations of users/teams/bots, can be designed to catalyze Remote Teams of all kinds, this process can also be automated. Keybase includes Git integration for versioning, bots from multiple platforms to facilitate audio/video-conferencing, a Cryptocurrency wallet, and many advanced privacy features to make you more or less traceable.

Services like Slack and Discord are centralized platforms that perform analytics on your behavior and can sell or leak this data to 3rd parties. Any audio/video features available within Slack or Discord, are bound to be less secure and less flexible than excellent alternatives such as Jitsi. Slack and Discord do have a fun, causal feel to them, which can potentially facilitate social engagement in certain conditions (also many users are already on these platforms).

Centralized and Proprietary team platforms such as Discord and Slack have a large market presence (at least in the USA) based on their first-mover advantage, name recognition, and network effects from size. However these products do not have the flexibility or power of Keybase. Keybase excels on its own excellence, and also has an open and active developer community.

Find us on Keybase: @remotorteam (Keybase username) @remotor.public (Public Keybase Team)

I'm a big fan of threaded conversations. After getting used to them, you start realizing what a terrible mess unthreaded chat systems such as Slack are. They are just horribly unproductive.

FlowDock is the only team chat system I know that has threads done right. Unfortunately, it has two flaws:

1. It has not seen any development in years. The app has changed ownership recently, so this might change for the better.
2. It is stupidly easy to misuse by newbies who are not yet familiar with threads: instead of replying to threads, they just keep starting new ones and mess up conversations. Teaching everyone to use threads in FlowDock is hard.

For this reason, I cannot recommend FlowDock to a team of 66, especially if it includes non-technical staff. Unless you're eager to patiently work with every individual teammate to constantly remind them to not start new threads.

I'm submitting a feature request to FlowDock asking to solve this problem for good.

The second best is Microsoft Teams. Its threads are not nearly as efficient as FlowDock, but they exist and they do their job. And it does not suffer from the newbie misuse problem.

Don't use Slack. Slack claims to have threads, but its threads implementation is a patch on top of unthreaded conversations, and it actually makes things worse. Slack is counterproductive.

Discord is the only chat system I know that is perfect for open and semi-open (invite-only) communities. There's also Gitter but it hasn't seen progress in years. Discord has no threads and no benefits for a closed team.