How to Create a Twitter Experience on Telegram
This quick guide shows how you can start your personal Twitter-style timeline on Telegram. It is a bit hacky now but they will improve the user experience over time.
Why, though?
- People are concerned with increasing censorship on Twitter;
- Telegram has a giant network effect with 400 million users globally;
- Telegram's founder Pavel Durov has a history of fighting state-level censorship.
Step 1. Create a channel by clicking New Channel.
This is your feed. You broadcast messages here just like on Twitter. People can subscribe to it which is similar to following.
Step 2. Create a private group chat by clicking New Group.
This group is needed to accept comments on your feed. Without it, people will not be able to reply to your posts to create conversations like on Twitter. The hacky part is that you need a second account to create a group (although you can add some random bot there—I used @getmyid_bot). You can also use an existing group but keep in mind that the group will also receive all the posts and comments which may spoil the group experience for some users.
Step 3. Connect the Channel to the Group to enable channel discussions.
Go to your channel, click Edit > Discussions and then pick the newly created group. Save.
Step 4. Enjoy the Twitter experience on Telegram desktop or mobile.
That’s it. Now you have a personal feed to which people can subscribe and comment on. This is what it looks like.
As I mentioned on Twitter, what’s really missing here is a unified feed of such channels to create a true Twitter-like experience. But the folks at Telegram seem to like the idea. So, now we wait!
Channels with attached Discussion Groups can be commented on. Now, for the unified feed - that's a neat idea. The best ways to do that now would be a bot forwarding posts from channels to a unified channel – but I'll pass the word along to the devs.
— Telegram Messenger (@telegram) November 9, 2020
P.S. If you want to cross-post from Twitter to Telegram, check out this tool.
P.P.S. Yes, Durov tried to delve into shitcoinery and has had a massive headache because of that. I hope he has learned that all roads lead to bitcoin, and we will see Telegram integrate bitcoin payments at some point, which will make it the most powerful messenger in the world.