Telegram Serverless

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?

This is cool. I wish Signal had a bot API like telegram's.

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"..

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?

A few questions and if someone knows please help:

1) storage limits? 2) can access the internet? If so: bandwidth limits?

Thanks!

With the popularity of Hermes, OpenClaw, etc, BotFather is quite a linchpin in the AI ecosystem.

I don't see anything about pricing.

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.

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.

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telegram is full of bots and spam.

before it was a better WhatsApp alternative. now either WhatsApp or Signal.