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eamag 7 hours ago [-]
What are the quotas like execution time, storage etc?
xd1936 7 hours ago [-]
Thinking about using this to run my Plex server
ameliaquining 4 hours ago [-]
I suppose tunneling over Telegram isn't really more ridiculous than tunneling over DNS. Indeed, someone seems to have tried it: https://github.com/PiMaker/Teletun
imhoguy 6 hours ago [-]
Clever idea! Although after reading it briefly I see a need for secrets storage.
I've made one Telegram bot hosted on VPS with Docker and cloud LLM. It also interacts with a few other outside services and all credentials are injected via env vars now.
Should I push them as `.env` file for Telegram serverless?
ameliaquining 4 hours ago [-]
Pretty sure you can't do this, you'd need to instead move them into a lib/secrets.js file (which you'd then add to .gitignore).
It does seem kind of odd that they have so little support for developer amenities like secrets management, dependency management, cron tasks, TypeScript, etc, and didn't shape their API in a way that suggests that stuff's coming later. I don't think it'd be that hard to clone the parts of the Cloudflare Workers API that offer that stuff (workerd is even open source, and offers out of the box the V8-based tenant isolation that they need). Perhaps they don't want to support npm packages because this'd make people more likely to run into undocumented code-size limits?
domh 7 hours ago [-]
This is cool. I wish Signal had a bot API like telegram's.
geek_at 1 hours ago [-]
I use a signal api on a daily basis for all my agentic chatting and notifications about energy prices and server downtime notification.
Setup was quick enough but it needs a real phone number once during setup which is kind of a hassle. still better than using telegram which has no encryption for the bot backend so the devs can read everything you write
AgharaShyam 6 hours ago [-]
I wish WhatsApp did... hopefully it goes the way of BBM and a more developer friendly platform becomes the norm among normies.
domh 5 hours ago [-]
WhatsApp does appear to have some "business" account/API type stuff which I assume is scriptable. But I don't believe it's got a free tier for personal use (although I haven't personally looked).
It is always preferable to use WhatsApp to contact a business than calling up.
ivanmontillam 3 hours ago [-]
Yes, but it's nowhere near the maturity of Telegram's Bot API.
And unlike Telegram, for a WhatsApp bot you need to apply with a bunch of paperwork. If you're an SMB, you got little chances of ever getting access. They'll tell you to go with their Technology Partners and make a chatbot with these other BigTech companies like Freshworks, etc.
pajamasam 5 hours ago [-]
Hmmm no, Meta is making money from businesses using their API.
qmmmur 4 hours ago [-]
Same. I used to use telegram for everything and then stopped after I realised it wasn’t really and to end encrypted. The bots were super useful. I used to have one I could ask different bus times for. Was so much better than the app the local bus company had made.
stiltzkin 2 hours ago [-]
[dead]
7 hours ago [-]
timtody 5 hours ago [-]
Not having a bot API is one of the many things that makes Signal amazing
ameliaquining 4 hours ago [-]
Why? Bots using the bot API can't send unsolicited messages to people. (Bots that control regular user accounts without using the API can of course do this, but Signal's not immune to that either.)
floppyd 4 hours ago [-]
Not having a bot API is what stops me from moving to Signal. I have 10-ish telegram bots running for myself, I just use telegram as UI for a script running on backend, and results are easily shareable with my other telegram contacts. I have no clue why not having this is amazing in any way.
justsomehnguy 15 minutes ago [-]
Guess you never even read the docs, less use it.
codedokode 4 hours ago [-]
Bots are separate accounts, marked as bots and cannot message anyone first.
leourbina 45 minutes ago [-]
Just use Cloudflare Workers. Incredibly fast, super cheap and stable and very mature.
raybb 7 hours ago [-]
Providing a SQLite db out of the box is a nice touch. I wonder if they're capping it's size in any way.
victorbjorklund 7 hours ago [-]
I don't see anything about pricing.
freeatnet 6 minutes ago [-]
There isn't anything about pricing yet because it's in closed beta.
The lack of a clear business model does make me hesitate in building anything substantial on it.
Supposedly Telegram has been profitable since 2024 but there's crypto stuff mixed in there so it's hard to know how stable that is.
dakolli 3 hours ago [-]
The have a massive advertising business, and charge for premium accounts. Not sure what makes you doubt them when other platforms, like Signal, have zero business model and are just providing services "out of the goodness of their heart" (not suspicious at all).
simonw 1 hours ago [-]
I want to understand the business model behind this specific feature.
catapart 7 hours ago [-]
I'm also curious about this.
sam_lowry_ 6 hours ago [-]
free so far.
dist-epoch 7 hours ago [-]
sounds free to me
lukan 4 hours ago [-]
But will it stay free, once enough people invested in it?
Telegram engaged in a bit shady crypto stuff, and let scammer bots roam freely. Also there are perks, if someones troll/harass/spam and scam groups and enough people report them, they get temporary or permanently restricted - unless they pay money to Telegram. Then they are free to troll again.
bdcravens 6 hours ago [-]
With the popularity of Hermes, OpenClaw, etc, BotFather is quite a linchpin in the AI ecosystem.
codedokode 5 hours ago [-]
It looks like they are making their own cloud, with such a little team?
Also we should be using Matrix but it doesn't have half of the features (no channels, no mini apps etc).
Also I wonder whether compiling JS to native code is worth the hassle or not. In browser, it would slow down page load, but here you need to compile only on deploy.
ameliaquining 4 hours ago [-]
This is barely a cloud, since it only serves one particular purpose and everything runs in V8 isolates. Although they would need to ensure they're appropriately capping each tenant's compute and bandwidth; the article mostly doesn't get into that.
Fully AOT compilers for JavaScript are basically research projects rather than production-ready platforms, because the extensive dynamicity of JavaScript's semantics makes this a hard problem. (The most mature one I'm aware of is https://porffor.dev.) But even if that weren't the case, the thing Telegram is doing requires V8's low-overhead tenant isolation, so they're bound to V8's architectural choices. V8 does have APIs for code caching and startup snapshots; Telegram could be generating those at deploy time.
AnonC 7 hours ago [-]
Emphasis mine:
> Each invocation runs in a lightweight V8 isolate, close to Telegram's own systems, so calls to the Bot API and your database are quick and reliable.
Telegram’s servers are distributed worldwide. I understand that the calls to the Bot API may be quick because the serverless code would be propagated to the edge, but how does it handle an SQLite DB? Is that also replicated to guarantee quick access from anywhere?
laosb 6 hours ago [-]
Telegram's servers are far from "distributed worldwide": In fact, it currently has only 5 logical "data center"s, and while DC3 is still on, clues [0] seem to suggest DC3 doesn't actually carry user data at all now, and both DC2 and 4 are in Amsterdam, so essentially they just need to serve 3 locations.
Also, Telegram's protocol design only allows for connecting to user's home DC for any write interactions (except media, which in most cases still is home DC, or a "media DC" alongside the home DC). Bots are based on the same DC of the user, so almost all meaningful interactions will happen only on one DC for any specific bot.
My first guess would be replicaton isn't that critical, because a user would mostly interact with an instance that's nearby, and this instance has their data. But the page mentions:
> Games and Tools — including leaderboards, quizzes and more.
A leaderboard that's globally consistent, huh, that's not trivial.
Maybe they just propagate the SQL commands to all their servers...
lukan 4 hours ago [-]
"My first guess would be replicaton isn't that critical, because a user would mostly interact with an instance that's nearby, and this instance has their data. But the page mentions"
Apparently not
"Each account is associated with a DC upon registration and does not change with the user’s phone number or geographic location. Users cannot freely choose a DC—if connected to the wrong DC, the server returns an error message, requiring the client to connect to the correct DC associated with the account."
I think there is no replication and each bot runs on a certain server.
weli 6 hours ago [-]
I guess the v8 isolate is heavily restricted and sandboxed and can't be used to access the local filesystem
kreco 4 hours ago [-]
The title made me realized that there is less and less use of the "serverless".
Which was one of the most non-sensical word to say "You don't maintain the server".
nunobrito 6 hours ago [-]
A few questions and if someone knows please help:
1) storage limits?
2) can access the internet? If so: bandwidth limits?
Thanks!
ameliaquining 4 hours ago [-]
The post doesn't say anything about runtime resource limits, which I agree is a strange omission given the architecture they've chosen. I suppose someone could try building a bot that uses more and more resources, and see when it stops working.
There's a section about making HTTP requests (https://core.telegram.org/bots/serverless#http), which mentions "two constraints: * Response content is textual (binary payloads aren't supported). * The total response is capped at 32 MB. That cap covers the whole response — streaming with res.body lets you process a large body incrementally, but it does not raise the limit." Unclear whether the 32 MB limit is per outgoing request, or shared among all outgoing requests made by a single handler invocation. Also unclear what other limits apply. Non-HTTP protocols presumably are not available.
codedokode 4 hours ago [-]
This means the code must pass the URL in cleartext so that Telegram can detect those who try to use bots for scraping and proxies.
ameliaquining 4 hours ago [-]
If you're talking about the lack of support for binary responses, I don't think this'd stop people from using Base64 to tunnel arbitrary payloads? Otherwise I'm not sure what the alternative would be to "passing the URL in cleartext" to an HTTP client.
codedokode 3 hours ago [-]
No I meant you must use an API that accepts URL and cannot create SSL sockets and hide communication from Telegram.
honeycrispy 6 hours ago [-]
We're never getting away from Javascript, are we
6 hours ago [-]
5 hours ago [-]
zb3 5 hours ago [-]
I thought this was about P2P messaging (without servers, hence server "less"), but no, obviously "serverless" on HN has to mean "run code on someone else's servers"..
ameliaquining 4 hours ago [-]
It's not the terminology I'd have picked if I'd been asked, but at this point it's clearly established and we might as well use it.
sidcool 4 hours ago [-]
I did not understand this. What does this do exactly?
ameliaquining 4 hours ago [-]
Lets you write a Telegram bot in JavaScript and have Telegram run the code for you on their own servers (with authentication and such handled automatically) instead of having to separately wrangle a cloud deployment.
freakynit 2 hours ago [-]
Dude.. how do I even enable that serverless toggle? It's not even there. I have updated my app just now.
"In @BotFather, open your bot → Serverless and turn it on" .... nop... that setting isn't even there.
nireko 46 minutes ago [-]
when i can start?????
nireko 44 minutes ago [-]
I hope to start using this telegram service after the football match.
stavros 7 hours ago [-]
This is off-topic, but I was kind of surprised to see this page written by Claude. I guess I shouldn't really be surprised, but I somehow didn't expect it.
codedokode 4 hours ago [-]
Could it be because the author is not very confident in their English skills so they asked an LLM to translate text to a proper English?
stavros 3 hours ago [-]
It could be, it could also be that they wanted to produce it more cheaply, could be a few valid reasons. It just looks cheap to me, and I thought companies would want to show a better face.
Then again, like a sibling said, only LLMs will be reading this anyway.
codedokode 3 hours ago [-]
But to write the text, LLM needs some source, where does it come from? You need to write something anyway.
jore 7 hours ago [-]
Out of curiosity - how did you figure this out? I cannot find any hints about that. Was it the language used?
zackkrida 7 hours ago [-]
language, structure. look how much negation there is. the construction "no A, no B, no, C" is used several times.
or another example, the following sentence:
"handlers/ is flat — no subdirectories"
who writes like this? you'd just write "handlers/ is a flat folder" or similar.
usui 7 hours ago [-]
I often see replies to AI-generated posts being pointed out here asking what makes it obvious. Is it that difficult to notice the indicators? Is it mostly undetected by English-as-a-second-language speakers, people inexperienced with generative AI, or is it something else?
vidarh 6 hours ago [-]
I rather think the surprise is a result of technical users wildly overestimating how obvious these markers are to people.
"it doesn't silently go unnoticed", "would be silently inert", "instead of silently overwriting", "you can never silently overwrite"
The biggest tell for me is overuse of the term "silently". "quietly" is another one you often see from Claude in particular. Models love adverbs for whatever reason, whereas a human writer would use them in moderation for emphasis or prefer terms like "by accident".
ameliaquining 4 hours ago [-]
In my experience, "silently overwrite" appeared regularly in technical writing long before LLMs were a thing, because it's a useful concept to be able to point at. "Silently go unnoticed" is kind of redundant, though.
IanCal 6 hours ago [-]
Accidental things and silent things are very different. Accidental means you didn't mean to do it, silent means you don't know you've done it (or might not if you want to get picky, you could notice).
dools 6 hours ago [-]
Have you ever “wired” anything to anything else when developing software? No, because software doesn’t involve wires, but LLMs are quite convinced that it does.
Possibly the excessive use of em dashes. Just a guess.
mohammedmsgm 7 hours ago [-]
This is so obvious
The most AI generated MD in existence. It's also th excessive use of bold, only AI can make bold hard to read.
fakeBeerDrinker 7 hours ago [-]
Reply to the parent, not me. I understand this.
stavros 6 hours ago [-]
I can't quite tell you, it wasn't something specific, Claude's writing is just a specific sort of punchy. The "directly on X - no Y, no Z, no A" and the "this is the part you no longer have to do" just smell a lot like Claude. Also "removes that layer entirely", "they map cleanly onto each other", it's all just Claude.
It's how you see a painting and you know it's by Picasso, let's say, or you read an author and you know it's Hemingway. Everyone has their own unique style, and so does Claude. It's just that Claude is the most prolific writer in human history now.
dist-epoch 7 hours ago [-]
I finds it surprising you find it surprising.
Is this the best use of a human, to write a long, detailed manual for a feature? Which most likely will be read by another LLM?
_superposition_ 4 hours ago [-]
Hit the nail on the head. I find it surprising people give a fuck any more. Who likes writing documentation? Us devs being horrible at and hating to write documentation was a standard trope before llms. They do a better job and dont complain.
mschuster91 6 hours ago [-]
Good lord. This reeks of LLM... why should I use your product when you can't be bothered to have a human write it? Why should I trust it to work correctly or have been decently tested, neither of which is a given when having an AI vibe-code it?
And why is it one huge single page of word salad instead of self-contained units?
Anyway, good to see someone post a fully self contained example demonstrating core concepts. At least one thing done right.
adlpz 6 hours ago [-]
Sounds like it's free, so, why the hate? May as well have zero docs. I don't think they're trying to convince you of anything.
mschuster91 6 hours ago [-]
> Sounds like it's free, so, why the hate?
I see undisclosed usage of AI as a theft of my time.
adlpz 4 hours ago [-]
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4 hours ago [-]
mcraiha 7 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
dzonga 7 hours ago [-]
telegram is full of bots and spam.
before it was a better WhatsApp alternative. now either WhatsApp or Signal.
embedding-shape 6 hours ago [-]
> telegram is full of bots
It's been a core feature of Telegram since almost the beginning, and one of the main reasons I end up using Telegram, not sure why you'd think this is a drawback. The spam sucks though, not sure how they haven't got a handle on it yet.
vachina 6 hours ago [-]
If you don’t join spammy groups you won’t get spam
embedding-shape 6 hours ago [-]
Fair, I am a part of a bunch of groups I no longer care about that the spam might originate from. Thanks :)
kelvinjps10 7 hours ago [-]
those bots are different to these ones, for these you have to start the interaction. bots is the most useful feature of telegram
sgt 7 hours ago [-]
They should start charging for it. Like not a lot, maybe just a coffee a month. That should keep the bots away.
TacticalCoder 7 hours ago [-]
I use Telegram only for groups with people I know. I've got zero issues with boths.
Are you using public channels? (are those even a thing with Telegram?)
I've made one Telegram bot hosted on VPS with Docker and cloud LLM. It also interacts with a few other outside services and all credentials are injected via env vars now.
Should I push them as `.env` file for Telegram serverless?
It does seem kind of odd that they have so little support for developer amenities like secrets management, dependency management, cron tasks, TypeScript, etc, and didn't shape their API in a way that suggests that stuff's coming later. I don't think it'd be that hard to clone the parts of the Cloudflare Workers API that offer that stuff (workerd is even open source, and offers out of the box the V8-based tenant isolation that they need). Perhaps they don't want to support npm packages because this'd make people more likely to run into undocumented code-size limits?
Setup was quick enough but it needs a real phone number once during setup which is kind of a hassle. still better than using telegram which has no encryption for the bot backend so the devs can read everything you write
It is always preferable to use WhatsApp to contact a business than calling up.
And unlike Telegram, for a WhatsApp bot you need to apply with a bunch of paperwork. If you're an SMB, you got little chances of ever getting access. They'll tell you to go with their Technology Partners and make a chatbot with these other BigTech companies like Freshworks, etc.
Source: https://t.me/devs/199669
Supposedly Telegram has been profitable since 2024 but there's crypto stuff mixed in there so it's hard to know how stable that is.
Telegram engaged in a bit shady crypto stuff, and let scammer bots roam freely. Also there are perks, if someones troll/harass/spam and scam groups and enough people report them, they get temporary or permanently restricted - unless they pay money to Telegram. Then they are free to troll again.
Also we should be using Matrix but it doesn't have half of the features (no channels, no mini apps etc).
Also I wonder whether compiling JS to native code is worth the hassle or not. In browser, it would slow down page load, but here you need to compile only on deploy.
Fully AOT compilers for JavaScript are basically research projects rather than production-ready platforms, because the extensive dynamicity of JavaScript's semantics makes this a hard problem. (The most mature one I'm aware of is https://porffor.dev.) But even if that weren't the case, the thing Telegram is doing requires V8's low-overhead tenant isolation, so they're bound to V8's architectural choices. V8 does have APIs for code caching and startup snapshots; Telegram could be generating those at deploy time.
> Each invocation runs in a lightweight V8 isolate, close to Telegram's own systems, so calls to the Bot API and your database are quick and reliable.
Telegram’s servers are distributed worldwide. I understand that the calls to the Bot API may be quick because the serverless code would be propagated to the edge, but how does it handle an SQLite DB? Is that also replicated to guarantee quick access from anywhere?
Also, Telegram's protocol design only allows for connecting to user's home DC for any write interactions (except media, which in most cases still is home DC, or a "media DC" alongside the home DC). Bots are based on the same DC of the user, so almost all meaningful interactions will happen only on one DC for any specific bot.
[0]: https://dev.moe/en/3025
> Games and Tools — including leaderboards, quizzes and more.
A leaderboard that's globally consistent, huh, that's not trivial.
Maybe they just propagate the SQL commands to all their servers...
Apparently not
"Each account is associated with a DC upon registration and does not change with the user’s phone number or geographic location. Users cannot freely choose a DC—if connected to the wrong DC, the server returns an error message, requiring the client to connect to the correct DC associated with the account."
according to this source: https://dev.moe/en/3025
Also on the frontpage now:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48920475
Which was one of the most non-sensical word to say "You don't maintain the server".
1) storage limits? 2) can access the internet? If so: bandwidth limits?
Thanks!
There's a section about making HTTP requests (https://core.telegram.org/bots/serverless#http), which mentions "two constraints: * Response content is textual (binary payloads aren't supported). * The total response is capped at 32 MB. That cap covers the whole response — streaming with res.body lets you process a large body incrementally, but it does not raise the limit." Unclear whether the 32 MB limit is per outgoing request, or shared among all outgoing requests made by a single handler invocation. Also unclear what other limits apply. Non-HTTP protocols presumably are not available.
"In @BotFather, open your bot → Serverless and turn it on" .... nop... that setting isn't even there.
Then again, like a sibling said, only LLMs will be reading this anyway.
or another example, the following sentence:
"handlers/ is flat — no subdirectories"
who writes like this? you'd just write "handlers/ is a flat folder" or similar.
The biggest tell for me is overuse of the term "silently". "quietly" is another one you often see from Claude in particular. Models love adverbs for whatever reason, whereas a human writer would use them in moderation for emphasis or prefer terms like "by accident".
The most AI generated MD in existence. It's also th excessive use of bold, only AI can make bold hard to read.
It's how you see a painting and you know it's by Picasso, let's say, or you read an author and you know it's Hemingway. Everyone has their own unique style, and so does Claude. It's just that Claude is the most prolific writer in human history now.
Is this the best use of a human, to write a long, detailed manual for a feature? Which most likely will be read by another LLM?
And why is it one huge single page of word salad instead of self-contained units?
Anyway, good to see someone post a fully self contained example demonstrating core concepts. At least one thing done right.
I see undisclosed usage of AI as a theft of my time.
before it was a better WhatsApp alternative. now either WhatsApp or Signal.
It's been a core feature of Telegram since almost the beginning, and one of the main reasons I end up using Telegram, not sure why you'd think this is a drawback. The spam sucks though, not sure how they haven't got a handle on it yet.
Are you using public channels? (are those even a thing with Telegram?)
It is the thing with Telegram