Telegram

✅ Verified — configured and posted through.

The lowest-friction posting API in existence: no app review, no business verification, no cost, no rate-limit anxiety. If you are testing a publishing pipeline, do Telegram first — it proves the whole chain end to end in about five minutes.

What you get

Post text, images, video, and albums to a public channel via a plain HTTPS call. Works from any server, including serverless — no local gateway, no OAuth dance, no token refresh.

Prerequisites

A Telegram account. That's it.

Steps

1. Create the bot

Message @BotFather → /newbot → give it a display name and a username ending in bot. He replies with a token shaped like 123456789:AAF....

That token is TELEGRAM_BOT_TOKEN. Anyone holding it controls the bot — treat it as a password.

2. Create the channel

Telegram → new Channel (not a group). Public if you want a @handle; private works too but you'll need the numeric id.

3. Make the bot an admin

This is the step everyone misses. Channel → Administrators → Add Admin → search your bot's username → grant at minimum Post Messages.

A bot that is merely a member of a channel cannot post to it and the API error does not say so clearly.

4. Get the channel id

• Public channel: the handle works directly — @yourchannel
• Private channel: you need the numeric form, which looks like -1001234567890. Post any message in the channel, forward it to @userinfobot, and read the chat id. Note the -100 prefix is part of the id, not a typo.

That value is TELEGRAM_CHANNEL_ID.

5. Create a separate private review chat

Only needed if you use the draft-and-approve loop. Create a private group or channel, add the bot as admin the same way, and take its numeric id as TELEGRAM_REVIEW_CHAT_ID.

The traps

The bot must be an admin, not a member. The single most common failure. Adding the bot to the channel is not enough.

TELEGRAM_REVIEW_CHAT_ID must never equal TELEGRAM_CHANNEL_ID. The review chat receives draft messages carrying one-click publish links whose only protection is being unguessable. Send those to your public brand channel and you have published a button that lets any reader post as your brand. Our code deliberately refuses to default the review chat to the brand channel for exactly this reason.

Captions cap at 1024 characters; plain messages allow 4096. Attach an image to a longer post and the API rejects it. Our Telegram client handles this by sending the photo first and the full text as a follow-up message rather than truncating approved copy — worth replicating.

Don't use parse_mode on arbitrary copy. Markdown and HTML parse modes throw on unescaped characters that appear naturally in real writing — underscores, asterisks, brackets. We post as plain text on purpose.

The -100 prefix. A numeric channel id without it silently addresses a different chat type.

Environment variables

Verify

Check the bot is alive and the token is valid:

Copycurl -s "https://api.telegram.org/bot<TOKEN>/getMe"
# → {"ok":true,"result":{"username":"your_bot",...}}

Post a test message:

Copycurl -s -X POST "https://api.telegram.org/bot<TOKEN>/sendMessage" \
  -H 'Content-Type: application/json' \
  -d '{"chat_id":"@yourchannel","text":"pipeline test"}'

{"ok":false,"description":"chat not found"} almost always means the bot is not an admin, or the id is missing its -100 prefix.

In kun: the Social Hub's status dialog shows the Telegram row green with the resolved @username once both variables are set.

Limits

• Rate: ~30 messages/second overall, and roughly 20 messages/minute to the same chat. Far above any real posting cadence.
• Message length: 4096 characters; captions 1024.
• Media: photos up to 10 MB by URL, video up to 50 MB. Telegram fetches the URL itself, so it must be publicly reachable.
• Cost: free, with no announced plan to change.