10 guides
Public channel data, with no phone number to burn
Reading public Telegram channels without an account: what the anonymous preview actually renders, exact subscriber counts against the rounded ones, server-side keyword search, and the attachments nobody can reach without a phone number.
Scrape Telegram channels
A walkthrough of reading public Telegram channels anonymously: the four modes, when search beats reading a history, and what the anonymous preview does and does not render.
The Telegram API question
The Bot API cannot read a channel it is not in. MTProto needs a phone number and an api_id. The public web preview needs neither, and it is what a channel publishes to the open web.
Search versus crawl
Reading a channel's history to find 20 posts about one term took 25 requests and 712 KB. Asking Telegram to filter took 1 request and 24 KB. Same 20 results.
Exact subscriber counts
Every abbreviated figure Telegram displays is a rounded string. One extra 4 KB request returns the exact integer, and both numbers ship so the rounding stays auditable.
Stemming false positives
Telegram's search stems words rather than matching substrings, so it returns morphological relatives of your term. Filtering them out afterwards is free, and it has to happen before billing.
The attachment finding
Documents, voice notes, audio, stickers, locations and round videos never appeared once in the anonymous preview. Fields that would always be false were cut rather than shipped.
Field reference
Every field the Actor returns, with the rate it was actually filled on across 893 posts in 9 channels — including the two that vary enough by channel type that an average would mislead.
Channel discovery
Discover mode searches a curated catalogue of verified public channels by niche. What that catalogue is, what it is not, and why searching for a technology beats searching for an English phrase.
Channel id versus handle
A channel that renames itself breaks every dataset keyed on its handle. The internal id survives the rename, and it is on every row.
Data protection
A public post can contain an email, a phone number and a handle, and returning it in full is what makes it useful and what makes it personal data. Where that leaves the person running the run.