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?
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.
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
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.
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.
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.)
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"..
> 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?
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...
"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."
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.
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.
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.
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?
"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".
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.
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).
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.
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.
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.
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.
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".
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?
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.
What are the quotas like execution time, storage etc?
Thinking about using this to run my Plex server
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
This is cool. I wish Signal had a bot API like telegram's.
I wish WhatsApp did... hopefully it goes the way of BBM and a more developer friendly platform becomes the norm among normies.
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.
Hmmm no, Meta is making money from businesses using their API.
Not having a bot API is one of the many things that makes Signal amazing
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.
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.)
Providing a SQLite db out of the box is a nice touch. I wonder if they're capping it's size in any way.
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"..
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.
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?
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...
"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
Also on the frontpage now:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48920475
I guess the v8 isolate is heavily restricted and sandboxed and can't be used to access the local filesystem
A few questions and if someone knows please help:
1) storage limits? 2) can access the internet? If so: bandwidth limits?
Thanks!
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.
With the popularity of Hermes, OpenClaw, etc, BotFather is quite a linchpin in the AI ecosystem.
I don't see anything about pricing.
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
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.
We're never getting away from Javascript, are we
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.
Out of curiosity - how did you figure this out? I cannot find any hints about that. Was it the language used?
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.
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?
I rather think the surprise is a result of technical users wildly overestimating how obvious these markers are to people.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Signs_of_AI_writing
"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".
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.
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).
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.
Sure, even @Autowired
Confirmed AI: https://www.pangram.com/history/2c717a3e-a9c6-4595-96a0-1aa8...
Possibly the excessive use of em dashes. Just a guess.
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.
Reply to the parent, not me. I understand this.
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.
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?
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.
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.
> Sounds like it's free, so, why the hate?
I see undisclosed usage of AI as a theft of my time.
telegram is full of bots and spam.
before it was a better WhatsApp alternative. now either WhatsApp or Signal.
those bots are different to these ones, for these you have to start the interaction. bots is the most useful feature of telegram
> 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.
If you don’t join spammy groups you won’t get spam
Fair, I am a part of a bunch of groups I no longer care about that the spam might originate from. Thanks :)
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?)
> are those even a thing with Telegram?
It is the thing with Telegram