Notes
What the weekly measurement turns up, and the engineering decisions behind it.
All notes
| 22 Sept 2026 | Three ways to read a public Telegram channel, and what each one costs
Bot API, MTProto as yourself, or an HTTP API in front of it. The difference is not really technical: it is what each path asks you to own. |
| 19 Sept 2026 | Give your agent Telegram in five lines of config
Six of the eighteen Telegram servers in the official MCP registry ask you to log in as yourself. To read public channels you need a config block and a key. |
| 18 Sept 2026 | Over ten thousand files handle FLOOD_WAIT. Stack Overflow has one question about it
Every Telegram project meets this timer, and almost nobody writes down what they learned. Here is what FLOOD_WAIT actually means and why retrying makes it longer. |
| 17 Sept 2026 | Telethon is alive on Codeberg. Its GitHub repo has been archived since February
Telethon did not die. It moved — and the GitHub page every tutorial still links to has been archived since February. |
| 16 Sept 2026 | 52 channels hold 38 per cent of the audience
The largest one per cent of the index is 52 channels, and they hold 38.5% of every subscription we measure. The median channel has 15,988. |
| 16 Sept 2026 | The channel whose username is an empty string
Ask for @durov and the username field comes back as "". Not null, not missing — the six real handles moved into an array, and only one of them belongs in a link. |
| 16 Sept 2026 | The comments on a Telegram post are not on the post
They live in a linked discussion group with their own message ids, and a channel can have them on for one post and off for the next. |
| 5 Sept 2026 | A health check that returns 200 while everything else fails
The liveness probe answered fine for an hour while every real endpoint returned 503. That is worse than having no probe. |
| 5 Sept 2026 | The biggest channels are not the most recommended ones
Ranking 5,205 channels by subscribers and by inbound recommendations produces two almost disjoint lists. |
| 5 Sept 2026 | What this index deliberately does not collect
Public channel metadata and post timestamps. Not message contents, not member lists, nothing from private groups. |
| 5 Sept 2026 | Why a Telegram bot cannot read the channel you want
The Bot API is a permission boundary, not a missing feature. No amount of work gets you around it. |
| 5 Sept 2026 | Telegram shows you today's subscriber count and never yesterday's
Median growth across the index is -0.14% over 14 days, and 60.6% of channels are shrinking. Neither number exists inside Telegram. |
| 5 Sept 2026 | Telegram has no directory. We built one out of its own recommendations
Search returns ten results and stops. The recommendation graph returns 5,205 channels and keeps going. |