Telegram

Telegram
URL	http://telegram.org
Status	Online!
Archiving status	In progress...
Archiving type	Unknown
Project source	telegram-grab, telegram-items
Project tracker	telegram
IRC channel	#telegrab (on hackint)

Telegram is a mostly open source chat system (web and app-based) which acts as a social network due to features like group chats and channels, originally intended as a drop-in replacement for WhatsApp.

Like Facebook pages/groups and Twitter, Telegram chats can contain a significant amount of history (text, audio/video and images) of various online communities, as well as personal digital history.

Structure

Channels on Telegram are essentially public streams of posts, similar to Twitter or RSS.

Since 2019-06-01 (update blog post), it is possible to "preview" channels on the web (e.g. @Telegram at [1] or [2]).

Export methods

Web data only

These tools archive Telegram channels through their web view. Only public channels can be saved this way, and certain attachments (including PDFs and some very long videos) are not available.

• ArchiveTeam's telegram project archives as WARC, supporting all available web data. A bot in the project IRC channel accepts archival requests for eventual upload into the Wayback Machine; it understands the following commands:
  • !a <url> archives the given telegram.me or t.me url (autodetecting the page type).
  • !a channel:<channel name> archives the given channel.
  • !a post:<channel name>:<post id> archives the given post, including any discussions.
• snscrape exports textual channel data as JSONL (media support is pending).

Deprecated

• Chromebot was once used, but has been shut down due to data integrity issues. (Old jobs can be found via this wiki.)
• ArchiveBot was once used, but due to its lack of Javascript support, its results are inferior to those of the special-purpose Telegram project. Use the Telegram bot instead. (Old jobs can be found via the viewer.)

All data

• The official Telegram Desktop app exports as HTML or JSON.
• telegram-export (no longer maintained)
• telegram-history-dump (no longer maintained); introduction
• Pidgin sync

See also Bellingcat's guide.

Notable channels

• NEXTA Live - Belarus independent news

Telegram official

• https://t.me/s/Telegram
• https://t.me/s/durov
• https://t.me/s/durov_russia

Hong Kong pro-democracy movement / 2019–2020 Hong Kong protests

• https://t.me/s/hktgb
• https://t.me/s/reminder612
• https://t.me/s/scottscout
• https://t.me/s/antiextraditionverifiednews

QAnon

[3] [4]

• ?

2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine

• ?

See also

• ArchiveBot/Telegram (some sites related to Telegram)