Telegram has no directory. We built one out of its own recommendations

Telegram has around a billion users and no public directory. There is no category page, no equivalent of a subreddit list. The in-app search box returns roughly ten chats and that is the whole front door.

Which means channels are found by word of mouth and forwarded links — and that anyone trying to size a topic is guessing.

The edge Telegram does publish

For any public channel, Telegram maintains a list of channels it recommends alongside. Ten per lookup. It is a similarity graph, maintained by the platform, and it is the only structured discovery mechanism Telegram offers.

Walking it changes the arithmetic completely. A few hundred keyword searches gets a few hundred channels. Expanding along recommendations twice takes that into the thousands, and the graph-found channels are better targeted than the search results, because they are what Telegram itself considers adjacent.

The direction that is missing

The graph is published in one direction only. You can ask what Telegram shows beside a channel. You cannot ask who has that channel in their list.

Inverting it across the whole index is a few lines of code and produces something Telegram does not have: inbound recommendation degree. Outbound edges say what a channel is like; inbound degree says where it sits.

The two rankings disagree, and interestingly so. Very large channels often have low inbound degree, because Telegram places them beside other giants and giants are scarce. Mid-sized channels in dense niches accumulate far more. If the question is which channel anchors a topic, inbound degree answers it better than subscriber count does.

The current index holds 5,177 public channels across 20 topics, 645,049,485 subscribers between them. How it is measured, and who Telegram recommends most.