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by progval 709 days ago
Many reasons. The main ones me, it's because I can chose a client that fits my needs among the many mature clients. And it's very configurable, as well as scriptable (though I haven't needed scripts for a while).

Most clients store the history locally in plain text files, which makes them easy and fast to search in with grep.

> is it encrypted?

The short answer is no. Many clients support E2EE using an OTR (https://otr.cypherpunks.ca/) plugin but it's not very user-friendly and your recipient is unlikely to have such a plugin already installed
2 comments
lucb1e 709 days ago
Why is OTR not user friendly? I remember setting it up on Pidgin+MSN as a teenager so it can't have been very hard
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progval 709 days ago
That was acceptable back then, but now people expect E2EE to work out of the box.
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pabs3 708 days ago
OTR uses obsolete insecure crypto unfortunately.

https://dustri.org/b/time-to-sunset-otr.html

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