FAQ¶

Does it need a Telegram account or bot token? No. It reads the same public web pages a browser shows at t.me/s/<channel>.

Which channels work? Public channels with web preview enabled. Private channels, groups, users and bots are reported as 404.

Are all posts available? Everything the web preview shows. Telegram omits some content there (for example very large videos are marked available: false, and comments are not included).

How fresh is the data? At most 10 s old with the default CACHE_MODE=normal (120 s with aggressive, live with off). Previews are cached for an hour. See API overview → Freshness.

Will Telegram block my server? Heavy uncached traffic can get an IP rate-limited by t.me (503 responses). Keep caching on, use Redis when you run several workers, keep TELEGRAM_MAX_CONCURRENCY moderate and put a CDN or proxy cache in front for public deployments.

Why is /v1/feed disabled? It needs a page of every channel in the request, so it is much more expensive than the other endpoints. Enable it with ENABLE_FEED=true, ideally with Redis.

Why are counters strings? They are returned exactly as Telegram formats them (10.3M), which can be lossy; converting them would suggest precision that does not exist.

Why is text.entities[].offset sometimes surprising? Offsets index the plain string as Python counts characters (code points), not UTF-16 code units as the Telegram Bot API does.

I get 502. Telegram probably changed its markup. Please open an issue with the URL.

I get 422 for a valid channel. Usernames must be 5–32 characters, start with a letter and contain only letters, digits and _. Pass them without @.

Can I run it without Docker? Yes: uv run telegram-me serve (or pip install . and telegram-me serve).