Also, plenty of people collaborate in private on GitHub. It has free private collaboration these days, not to mention.. paid. While it never strongly irked me that SSH public keys are visible, it’s not really that obvious. And I don’t buy the “but it has public in the name!” bit either. Sure, it’s not made to be confidential, but that doesn’t mean it should be published indiscriminately. I mean, I’m using it to authenticate to GitHub, and nobody browsing GitHub needs it.

Having them visible by default can be convenient. I’ve used it to populate authorized_hosts for example. However it is unnecessary and unexpected. If you use different private keys on each machine, it reveals a lot of opsec info you may not have expected to be public.

It’s a “public” key in the cryptographic sense, not in the address book sense.