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)
Data[how to use]	archiveteam_telegram

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]).

How to help if you have lists of URLs

This project requires lists of URLs for content on the target website. If you have a source of URLs, please:

1. Use the PCRE regular expression (telegram\.me|//([^/]*\.)?t\.me)(:\d+)?/(?!share/)\S+ for filtering.
   • Note that this regex is intentionally broad to cover many different URL formats. Please do not try to use a more narrow pattern as it may miss valid URLs. We can always filter or transform the results as needed later.
   • Enable case-insensitive matching (e.g. -i option on grep) to not miss URLs with capitalised domains or similar.
   • If you use grep, remember to include the -a (aka --text on GNU grep) option to ensure it will continue searching for matches when encountering binary data.
   • Example command (GNU grep): grep -Pahoi '(telegram\.me|//([^/]*\.)?t\.me)(:\d+)?/(?!share/)\S+' FILENAME FILENAME...
2. If the output exceeds a few megabytes, please compress it, preferably using zstd -10.
3. Upload the file to https://transfer.archivete.am/.
4. Share the resulting URL in the project IRC channel.
   • If you would like to keep the list non-public instead, e.g. for privacy reasons or for not wanting to be publicly associated with it, please get in touch with a channel op (e.g. arkiver or JustAnotherArchivist). Note that the items generated from your list would still be processed publicly, of course, but they would be mixed with everything else.

See also Category:Projects requiring URL lists for other ArchiveTeam projects that necessitate URL lists.

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 (and including outlinks). Suggestions are welcome! A bot in the project IRC channel accepts archival requests for eventual upload into the Wayback Machine; it understands the following commands:

• !help prints a help message listing available commands.
• !a archives Telegram data once.
  • !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.
• !p archives a Telegram channel once immediately, then queues it for periodic re-archiving. (This is preferred for active, significant channels.)
  • !p <channel> <interval> <time-to-live> archives the given channel (as <url> or channel:<name>) once every interval seconds for the next time-to-live seconds (optional, default 1 year).
• !pget, !prenew, or !pdelete <channel> gets info for, renews, or deletes a periodic item, respectively.
• !pdump dumps info for all periodic items.

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

See also this etherpad of third-party channel lists.

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

• ?

Other

• NEXTA Live - Belarus independent news
• ?

See also

• ArchiveBot/Telegram (some sites related to Telegram)