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Telegram Serverless
- luciandan 2mo agoSo basically wire this up to OpenRouter and you have your own LLM chat with your rules, storage, memory etc. Pretty neat! (Meanwhile Whatsapp's API-based bot is typically only free at very small volume or during specific free windows how are they so far behind?)
- stavros 2mo agoThis 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.
- jore 2mo agoOut of curiosity - how did you figure this out? I cannot find any hints about that. Was it the language used?
- fakeBeerDrinker 2mo agoPossibly the excessive use of em dashes. Just a guess.
- mohammedmsgm 2mo ago[flagged]
- fakeBeerDrinker 2mo agoReply to the parent, not me. I understand this.
- usui 2mo agoI 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 2mo agoI rather think the surprise is a result of technical users wildly overestimating how obvious these markers are to people.
- zackkrida 2mo agolanguage, 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.
- petercooper 2mo ago"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".
- IanCal 2mo agoAccidental 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).
- ameliaquining 2mo agoIn 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.
- haunter 2mo agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Signs_of_AI_writing https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Signs_of_AI_writing
- stavros 2mo agoI 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.
- dools 2mo agoHave 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.
- ameliaquining 2mo agoConfirmed AI: https://www.pangram.com/history/2c717a3e-a9c6-4595-96a0-1aa80f539c5b https://www.pangram.com/history/2c717a3e-a9c6-4595-96a0-1aa8...
- dist-epoch 2mo agoI 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_ 2mo agoHit 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.
- codedokode 2mo agoCould 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 2mo agoIt 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 2mo agoBut to write the text, LLM needs some source, where does it come from? You need to write something anyway.
- mcraiha 2mo ago[flagged]
- raybb 2mo agoProviding a SQLite db out of the box is a nice touch. I wonder if they're capping it's size in any way.
- eamag 2mo agoWhat are the quotas like execution time, storage etc?
- xd1936 2mo agoThinking about using this to run my Plex server
- ameliaquining 2mo agoI 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 https://github.com/PiMaker/Teletun
- dprkh 2mo agoOn Telegram, storage is unlimited™
- domh 2mo agoThis is cool. I wish Signal had a bot API like telegram's.
- deleted 2mo ago[deleted]
- AgharaShyam 2mo agoI wish WhatsApp did... hopefully it goes the way of BBM and a more developer friendly platform becomes the norm among normies.
- marysol5 2mo agoIt's bad enough with fake profiles scamming and spamming people, would be a lot worse with more automation
- domh 2mo agoWhatsApp 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 2mo agoYes, 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 2mo agoHmmm no, Meta is making money from businesses using their API.
- timtody 2mo agoNot having a bot API is one of the many things that makes Signal amazing
- victorbjorklund 2mo agoI don't see anything about pricing.
- catapart 2mo agoI'm also curious about this.
- dist-epoch 2mo agosounds free to me
- lukan 2mo agoBut 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.
- simonw 2mo agoThe 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 2mo agoThe 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 2mo agoI want to understand the business model behind this specific feature.
- dzonga 2mo agotelegram is full of bots and spam. before it was a better WhatsApp alternative. now either WhatsApp or Signal.
- sgt 2mo agoThey should start charging for it. Like not a lot, maybe just a coffee a month. That should keep the bots away.
- throw-the-towel 2mo agoThey do. Literally every spambot I see on Telegram has a paid account.
- kelvinjps10 2mo agothose bots are different to these ones, for these you have to start the interaction. bots is the most useful feature of telegram
- TacticalCoder 2mo agoI 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?)
- flexagoon 2mo ago> are those even a thing with Telegram? It is the thing with Telegram
- embedding-shape 2mo 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.
- 2mo ago
- AnonC 2mo agoEmphasis 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?
- weli 2mo agoI guess the v8 isolate is heavily restricted and sandboxed and can't be used to access the local filesystem
- netsharc 2mo agoMy 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 2mo 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." according to this source: https://dev.moe/en/3025 https://dev.moe/en/3025 Also on the frontpage now: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48920475 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48920475
- laosb 2mo agoTelegram'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 https://dev.moe/en/3025
- bdcravens 2mo agoWith the popularity of Hermes, OpenClaw, etc, BotFather is quite a linchpin in the AI ecosystem.
- mschuster91 2mo agoGood 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 2mo agoSounds 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 2mo ago> Sounds like it's free, so, why the hate? I see undisclosed usage of AI as a theft of my time.
- adlpz 2mo ago[dead]
- tkel 2mo agoIf they can't be bothered to write it , why should I be bothered to read it?
- adlpz 2mo agoPresumably because you've read the first sentence, Telegram Serverless lets you run backend code for your bot and Mini App directly on Telegram's infrastructure, and were interested by the service/proposition enough to keep reading and then noticing it's LLM slop. :)
- deleted 2mo ago[deleted]
- nunobrito 2mo agoA few questions and if someone knows please help: 1) storage limits? 2) can access the internet? If so: bandwidth limits? Thanks!
- ameliaquining 2mo agoThe 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 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 2mo agoThis 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 2mo agoIf 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 2mo agoNo I meant you must use an API that accepts URL and cannot create SSL sockets and hide communication from Telegram.
- honeycrispy 2mo agoWe're never getting away from Javascript, are we
- deleted 2mo ago[deleted]
- imhoguy 2mo agoClever 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 2mo agoPretty 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?
- codedokode 2mo agoIt 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 2mo agoThis 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 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.
- deleted 2mo ago[deleted]
- zb3 2mo agoI 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 2mo agoIt'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.
- kreco 2mo agoThe 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".
- marysol5 2mo ago"Yo dawg, I heard you hated cloud, so we re-branded cloud"
- sidcool 2mo agoI did not understand this. What does this do exactly?
- ameliaquining 2mo agoLets 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 2mo agoDude.. 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 2mo agowhen i can start?????
- nireko 2mo agoI hope to start using this telegram service after the football match.
- leourbina 2mo agoJust use Cloudflare Workers. Incredibly fast, super cheap and stable and very mature.
- BiteCode_dev 2mo agoI always wondered how telegram could afford being free. A chat is expensive to run, a chat with gigantic media quotas even more, and they don't have ads. There is no way their premium plan cover their cost, espacially with their extensive bot API that multiplies their traffic tenfold. And now they add free hosting of bots on top? How the hell are they doing that?
- pona-a 2mo agoA sustainable patronage from the Russian intelligence community? /j
- blackoil 2mo ago> A chat is expensive to run Is it? A mid-size server can support couple of million of users. Storage of large files may cost something but not the chat service is super simple and cheap to run.
- BiteCode_dev 2mo agoThey got 1 billion monthly active users in 2025. This is a write intensive workload with signaling accross all of them, including in rooms with hundreds of users, who can upload huge videos in an unlimited searchable history. Then you got misbehaved scripts, ddos attempts, authentication for every message, encryption... Yeah, it's expensive as hell, even with an optimised erlang backend. In fact, if they manage to get all that down to one cent per user per month, which is very cheap for such a service, it's still 10 millions to run just in hosting.
- thisislife2 2mo agoApparently advertisement and premium membership.