Say what you want about Telegram, but it has one of...

Say what you want about Telegram, but it has one of the best data export/backup features I've ever seen.

Fully client-driven, with real-time progress display (and even the ability to manually skip large file downloads on-the-fly).

The output is a bunch of plain HTML pages with just 200 lines of pure JS (no frameworks) for some minor interactivity features, that loads instantly and looks roughly like the Telegram client itself, easy to browse and search.

The JSON is one big blob with all the same data in a trivial format. The text encoding is interesting: Telegram supports rich text, but instead of in-line HTML-style markup, in the JSON it's encoded as JSON objects representing the different spans of text with different format. Very clean.

"Export Your Data" Telegram dialog with fine-grained control over what is exported and how, as well as format control.

Snippet of Telegram JSON export showing how text is marked up.

"text": [
"(tomorrow will be fun. we will have to take ",
{
"type": "italic",
"text": "first train"
},
" to tokyo to make the appointment with minimum murphy contingent. which, given my sleeping cycle, means: no sleep for me.)"
],
"text_entities": [
{
"type": "plain",
"text": "(tomorrow will be fun. we will have to take "
},
{
"type": "italic",
"text": "first train"
},
{
"type": "plain",
"text": " to tokyo to make the appointment with minimum murphy contingent. which, given my sleeping cycle, means: no sleep for me.)"
}
]

Like 26 August at 8:33 | Open on social.treehouse.systems

2 comments

Hector Martin

I'm all for Signal and E2EE and distributed systems and all that, but... Telegram is, by far, the least-bullshit most-fun messenger I've ever used. Everything just seems to work, it's lean, has native open source client apps, a big pile of features that are cohesively integrated and work, API/bot support, useful stuff like automatic translation (premium feature, but that's understandable since translation APIs aren't free), etc.

Other platforms would do well to learn from it.

26 August at 8:37 | Open on social.treehouse.systems

:blobcatlaptop: gravitos :blobcatcomfsip:

@marcan

a big pile of features that are cohesively integrated and work

did you know that like half of telegram's features are actually just messages disguised to not look like messages?

like, comments? or threads?

tdlib actually falls apart if you participate in too much chats, and i participate in too much chats

telegram x, the supposedly lighter client based on tdlib (see above!) still does not have tabs

one of my friends actually did work in the telegram x team and they are a clusterfuck of horrible people doing horrible decisions, and not just about the app. he left the team and is still depressed after whatever the fuck they did to him

@marcan

a big pile of features that are cohesively integrated and work

did you know that like half of telegram's features are actually just messages disguised to not look like messages?

like, comments? or threads?

tdlib actually falls apart if you participate in too much chats, and i participate in too much chats

Expand text...

26 August at 9:09 | Open on wetdry.world