[mwest]

In theory you can use OTR[1] but I've yet to see an easy way to use this from a phone.

I remember IRC very fondly, but I feel it has a lot of baggage that makes it difficult to bring into the modern era.

This blog post (not mine) explains it quite well: https://jlu5.com/blog/im-tired-of-irc-heres-why

[1] https://otr.cypherpunks.ca/

[upofadown]

OTR doesn't do groups. So it isn't really applicable to IRC. At this point, I am not really sure that end to end encryption is generally applicable to groups. The identity management problem quickly spirals out of control. I note that Telegram doesn't even try. I think the best that can be done is a scheme that makes everyone entirely trust the moderator of the group.

[nix23]

>At this point, I am not really sure that end to end encryption is generally applicable to groups.

You encrypt the message with all the public key's from persons in the group, what's the problem? You do it the same way with Mail...aka pgp.

You don't need OTR just plain old gnupg:

https://www.gnupg.org/gph/en/manual/x110.html