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There are private IRC channels (password protected or invite-only) as well as private messages.

Hence the "usually" public, I presume. While this doesn't invalidate your point that IRC could use E2E encryption, I personally only use IRC for communication on public channels, where it would be largely pointless, unless you're assuming a really paranoid threat model, in which case public group conversation is probably not a good idea anyway.

exactly this

if it's public: who cares, and if it isn't: why are people trusting random IRC server admins

especially when there have previously been leaks from places like EFNet where admins have been caught running tcpdump or ircsniff.pl

> why are people trusting random IRC server admins

e2ee means that you do not have to trust anyone

> if it's public: who cares

IRC also lacks end to end authentication, the server owner can pretend to be you.

There's dcc chat, but then you trust the network in general in place of the irc network.

Fortunately, there's OTR, but client support is limited.

I wish the new ircstandarization efforts did work something out about e2e, at least for private messages.

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