alt Hacker Newsunlike IRC
There are a few IRC clients that support OTR. irssi-otr is one [1] weechat-otr is another [2]. Pidgin though I have not used it in a very long time. Hexchat using an always work in progress plugin. There may be others.
OTR could use some updates to include modern ciphers similar to the recent work of OpenSSH but probably good enough for most people.
E2EE aside having chat split up into gazillions of self hosted instances makes it much harder for chat to be hoovered up all in one place. It takes more effort to target each person and that becomes a government scalability issue. Example effort: [3]
[1] - https://github.com/cryptodotis/irssi-otr
[2] - https://github.com/mmb/weechat-otr
[3] - https://archive.ph/4wi5t
Links 1 and 2 have not had updates in 10 and 8 years respectively, they probably don't even compile anymore. They implement OTRv3 which was published in about 2005 and uses 1536-bits primes. As far as I know, neither the protocol nor the implementations were audited (and especially not audited recently). This is not good encryption at all.
Additionally, OTRv3 does not allow multiple clients per account, which makes it unusable for anyone who wants to chat from two devices.