What this index deliberately does not collect
Public channel metadata and post timestamps. Not message contents, not member lists, nothing from private groups.
5 Sept 2026
Any project that reads a messaging platform at scale has to answer where it stops. Ours stops in a specific place, and the reasoning is worth writing down rather than leaving implied.
What is collected
What Telegram shows any logged-out visitor to a public channel: name, @username, description, subscriber count, creation date, verification flags, and the recommendation list. Plus the timestamps of recent posts, from which a posting rate is computed.
What is not
Message contents. Timestamps give the cadence; the text is somebody else's writing and republishing a collection of it is not ours to do. It is also, incidentally, a much larger disk bill for information we would not use.
Member lists. Even where an endpoint exposes participants, enumerating the members of a channel is a different act from measuring the channel.
Anything private. Only channels with a public username. A group that requires an invite is out of scope, and there is no configuration flag that changes that.
Why the line sits there
Partly principle and partly durability. The adjacent lesson in this industry is Proxycurl, shut down in 2025 — not for collecting too much, but for where the data came from. Provenance decides whether a project survives, and a line drawn at "what a logged-out visitor sees" is one you can state in a sentence and defend without a lawyer.
If you run a channel indexed here and want it removed, that request is honoured. The address is in the terms.
Run the same measurements yourself
Free tier, no card. Every figure above came from one endpoint on a weekly schedule.