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Thinking about using this to run my Plex server

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

I wish WhatsApp did... hopefully it goes the way of BBM and a more developer friendly platform becomes the norm among normies.

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.

Not having a bot API is one of the many things that makes Signal amazing

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?

There isn't anything about pricing yet because it's in closed beta.

Source: https://t.me/devs/199669

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.

I'm also curious about this.

free so far.

sounds free to me

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.

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.

[0]: https://dev.moe/en/3025

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...

I think there is no replication and each bot runs on a certain server.

I guess the v8 isolate is heavily restricted and sandboxed and can't be used to access the local filesystem

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.

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.

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.

I hope to start using this telegram service after the football match.

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?

Out of curiosity - how did you figure this out? I cannot find any hints about that. Was it the language used?

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?

Apparently advertisement and premium membership.

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.

> 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.

those bots are different to these ones, for these you have to start the interaction. bots is the most useful feature of telegram

They should start charging for it. Like not a lot, maybe just a coffee a month. That should keep the bots away.

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?)