Blah Features

Telegram API layers 233 and 232 are supported. Clients announcing a layer below 232 receive INPUT_LAYER_INVALID; newer announcements use the latest supported schema.

Account

Recovery-word flows require matching client and cryptography runtime releases. telegram-tt remains on its old pin and is not migrated to recovery-word custody.

The federation fork starts with fresh databases. Existing coordinated deployments cannot upgrade their account data in place; keep their data and backups separate. Fresh databases have a new object namespace even if the DC keeps its federation key. Human login requires a Diem device proof; legacy phone/number, email-only login and plain Telegram QR tokens do not admit an account. See Signing up for the current workflow.

Sessions and account lifecycle

Active sessions and automatic expiry, with one device per Diem session for life and retirement when it ends. Seed holders publish device removal before resetting other sessions; non-holders can enter words to gain management or log themselves out. Session-device mappings and errors support safe termination and pruning of explicitly retired devices
Connected website list and access revocation
Account deletion, including automatic deletion after inactivity ³
Blah Beyond tier ⁶

Profile and contacts

Privacy

Chats

Private chats and chat list

Groups and channels

Group-specific features

Anonymous admins and custom member ranks
Anonymous admin actions and silent pin announcements in group history
Posting as an owned channel ¹⁸
Forum topics with tabs and sidebar layouts (layer 232 displays sidebar as tabs)
Group photo history
Members-only sending
Admin log ¹⁹
Seen By / read receipts for recent messages
Basic groups ²⁰

Channel-specific features

Communities

Communities linking channels, groups and bots ²²
Visible or hidden linked peers
Collaborative linking or administrator approval requests
Community administrators, title, description, picture and deletion
Communities can have their own Diem identity, like channels and supergroups ¹
Community-scoped bans ²³
Collapse a community in the chat list ²⁴
Search within a community ²⁵

Messaging

Content

Independent-home discovery and cross-DC messaging are under development. The messaging features below are available locally; across homes, support follows the federation rollout. Edits, deletions, reactions, read receipts and similar changes for a home that is temporarily unreachable are delivered in order once it returns. A new message needs the recipient’s home to answer its privacy check, so it fails while that home is down, and it is briefly refused with a retry delay while too many changes wait for that home. If applying a queued change requires another unavailable home, that change remains eligible for retry instead of being discarded as invalid. A delivery to a reachable home returns its result without waiting for later queued changes.

Text formatting, links, mentions, hashtags, cashtags, phone numbers, bank card numbers and bot commands
Photos, videos, audio, voice messages and documents
Albums and custom emoji in text
Reactions, polls and quizzes in private chats, groups and channels. Default 👍 👎 ❤ 💯 🤣 👀 🥳 🫪 😜 reactions ship with animation and still thumbnails; clients receive only reactions with complete artwork, while existing reactions remain supported. An unavailable quick default falls back to the first reaction with complete, active artwork.
The web client’s attachment menu works without installed attach-menu bots
Checklists in private chats and groups
Typing and recording indicators

Actions and search

Replies, editing and forwarding
Quote replies, including replies to a message in another group or channel ²⁶
Rich messages and rich quotes ²⁷
Delete for self or everyone
In-chat search
Search across chats ²⁵
Hashtag and cashtag search in chats and public channel posts ²⁵
Shared media, files, links, music and voice panels

Drafts, scheduling and import

Stickers and custom emoji

Set installation, archiving, reordering and search
Sets from another independent home install and open like your own; they do not appear in search
Sticker and custom emoji set creation and editing; a set’s short name is a domain name, found from any home once the set’s own identity claims it ²
A set whose profile advertisement is lost temporarily uses its identity as a short name while its home retries; a DC can configure a deletion grace period
Set thumbnails from documents you own, or clear the current thumbnail
Synced static, animated and video stickers render in channel and supergroup messages, including existing imports
The bridge reuses a Telegram pack’s mirror across synced chats and background copying
A sticker of a mirrored pack sent from Blah arrives in Telegram as that pack’s own sticker rather than as a copied file
Mask, Premium sticker, dice and official reaction sets (default 👍 👎 ❤ 💯 🤣 👀 🥳 🫪 😜 artwork is bundled)

Bots and applications

Bots

Connected accounts, web and files

Default reaction artwork adapts Google’s Noto Animated Emoji, licensed under CC BY 4.0, with timing, sizing and effects adapted by blah-reaction-art contributors.

A group, channel or community created without its own identity is limited to members on its home. Its creator can give it one later by signing a title, description or photo edit with that identity. A chat with an identity can have members on other homes, and a group or channel can take a public username; deleting it or changing its owner then needs the identity’s signature. ↩ ↩² ↩³
A username is a domain name, such as alice.one.example. Its domain serves the identity’s signed profile at /.well-known/blah/profile.cbor, and that profile lists the domain. Every listed domain is a username candidate. Groups, channels and bots take names through identities their owners’ devices hold. The DC service account uses its DC domain; other system accounts keep their reserved dotless names. tweb’s Blah build supports dotted mentions. User domains appear as collectible usernames after verification, with visibility and ordering selected in Edit Profile; ordinary editable usernames are unavailable. ↩ ↩² ↩³
When an account is deleted, or leaves for another home, the DC service account asks each person it had a private chat with whether to keep the media it sent them there. Kept media stays in the chat and counts toward your own storage, and a copy held on another data centre is moved to yours. Deleting it removes those messages at once; your own messages and its text messages stay either way. You have 30 days from the deletion to answer, and no answer deletes them. Media it also posted in a channel or group stays there. ↩ ↩²
Without a recovery email, a forgotten password resets after a delay; a signed-in device can cancel the request. ↩
Unregistered client apps may sign in, but Blah shows an in-app warning. ↩
Blah Beyond is the name of Blah’s Premium-compatible plan. It is granted by a Blah administrator, not sold. Until it expires, it raises upload, pinned-chat, public-link and per-message reaction limits and enables personal accent-color changes. ↩
Administrators choose the available palettes and custom-emoji patterns. Changing your own name/message or profile palette requires Blah Beyond; changing a chat’s requires permission to edit its info. Groups can color only their profile; channels can color both. Blah does not enforce boost requirements. ↩ ↩² ↩³
Block and unblock users or bots, manage your block list, and prevent private messages, typing, profile-photo and presence access across data centres. Existing chat history and shared groups remain available. ↩
New non-contacts need Blah Beyond to reach you; contacts and existing conversations remain reachable. ↩
Each chat list — the main one and the archive — keeps its own pinned order, and a pinned chat keeps its pin when you archive it. The limits depend on your account tier. ↩
Chats you archive leave your main list. An archived chat comes back when you write to it, and when it gets a new message unless you muted it — the privacy settings let you keep unmuted or foldered chats archived instead. You can also have first messages from people who aren’t your contacts arrive archived and muted. ↩
A folder can select chats by kind (contacts, groups, channels, bots), always include or always exclude particular chats, and pin chats within itself. How many folders you can keep, and how many chats one can name, depends on your account tier. ↩
A link can share a folder’s groups and channels with other people. Only chats someone else can join can be shared, and sharing a folder turns it into a plain list of chats. People who import your folder can be offered chats you add to the link later; their copy of the folder is their own. ↩
Appears once an app you granted peer access to shares a chat with you, and holds exactly those chats, excluding Saved Messages. A community an app gathers its chats into is in the folder too: nobody joins a community, so being in one of the chats it gathers is what puts it there. It appears last by default, after All and your other folders. The server keeps it current, so its name, its chats and its settings are not yours to change — you can only move it among your own folders. It is absent while no app shares a chat with you. ↩ ↩²
The DC service account is root until a root-admin group is set. The designated group’s local creator and administrators then receive deployment root access, including the DC account if it is an administrator. Changes sync automatically; configured human root identities retain access independently of the group. ↩
Only the group or channel owner can enable it. Forwarding out is refused even for the owner; saving, copying and screenshot restrictions depend on the client. Existing copies are unaffected, and private chats have no such switch. ↩
Only the owner can delete a group or channel, and it disappears for every member at once, including members on another data centre. Its public links are immediately free for someone else to claim. Its history, media and the storage they used are removed in the background shortly afterwards, so a large channel’s storage is released over the following minutes rather than instantly. ↩
An owned channel hosted separately from the destination may be unavailable as a posting identity. ↩ ↩²
Only entries within the server’s recent retention window are available. ↩
Creating a basic group creates a supergroup instead. ↩
Blah deliberately leaves channel posts unpinned in linked discussion groups. ↩
A community groups peers, not messages. Membership comes from its linked chats; a peer can belong to only one community. Older clients may not show communities or their management controls. ↩
A ban removes access to the community and its listings, not membership in its linked chats. ↩
A community shows either as one entry or as the chats inside it, and the choice is yours per community. A community created by an app you signed into starts collapsed for everyone in it — the app is what those chats are — until each member expands it. ↩ ↩²
Cross-chat, community and public-post search can omit groups or channels hosted separately from your account. Open a chat and search there to search its own history. Public channel web pages also search the channel’s own history across data centres. ↩ ↩² ↩³
A reply may quote a fragment of the message it answers, and may answer a message in another group or channel you can read — from a group, a channel or a private chat alike. A quote must still be text of the message it names, or the send is refused. A reply cannot point into a private chat, because a private message’s id means something different to each person in it. ↩
Blocks, HTML and Markdown support rich media and quotes, drafts, scheduling, copies and cross-DC delivery. Streamed drafts go to users only and may embed already-uploaded media and custom emoji. Copies retain only ordinary URL and copy-text buttons. Local bots support rich ephemeral messages and inline results; public channel timelines display rich posts. Rich quotes in saved drafts, rich quick replies, login buttons, translation and AI composition remain unsupported. See the Telegram sync note for bridge behavior. ↩
Imported messages retain their source sender and time. In a group, a sender connected to a Blah account is shown as that account; otherwise only the source attribution is shown, without the importing bot’s identity. Existing imports refresh automatically. Messages dated more than a minute away from the current time arrive silently through history refreshes, without push notifications or new mention alerts. Recent imports arrive live. ↩
Requires a configured bridge and matching chat types. The bridge connects to an explicitly configured Blah home DC and keeps its state bound to that DC’s identity. The bridge bot’s private-chat command menu lists /sync, /sync_sticker_set and /status on both services, plus /bind_bot and /unbind_bot on Telegram. Mappings accept usernames or numeric channel IDs, including with two-way backfill. Copies into Telegram are bot posts, not original-user messages, and unsupported content is skipped. Forum topic renames and closures sync as well. Rich messages cross in both directions with their media and edits; rich-content refusals can fall back to plain text. Replies in Blah to synced Telegram messages reply to their originals when copied back, including messages synced earlier. In two-way sync, changing a mirrored copy does not rewrite its original. A reply answering a message in another chat is copied as a reply to that chat’s copy when the bridge syncs it too, or to a copy the bridge collects in its “Referenced Messages” group; a message the bridge cannot reach at all becomes an italic “In reply to ” header, with any quoted text below it. A message the bridge cannot read is skipped rather than stalling the chat, and a sync that stops is reported to whoever set it up and retried on its own, leaving your other syncs running. ↩
Connect your Telegram account in the Blah control panel, create a managed bot through the syncer’s creation link from that account, and add it to the Telegram destination with permission to post. It sends only your Blah messages; other users keep the shared syncer with their names attached. If Telegram refuses a send, the fallback log includes its error and the syncer retries your bot after the membership check interval. If the syncer did not pick the bot up when you created it, bind it by hand from that Telegram account with /bind_bot @your_bot, or /bind_bot and its token for a bot you have the token of; /bind_bot alone lists the bots already representing you, and /unbind_bot gives one up. Live reactions use your personal bot and follow changes and removals, including on imported Telegram messages. Only your latest standard emoji is copied; custom and paid reactions are excluded. Previously recorded reaction targets are checked again after restart. ↩
Timed and view-once photos, videos, voice notes and video notes in private chats between users. The timer starts when the recipient opens the content. This is separate from chat auto-delete; secret chats are not supported. ↩
@bot replaces BotFather for bot creation and management. ↩
An enabled bot can answer a mention or /command@bot without joining; its reply names who invoked it. Managed guest bots currently work only in chats hosted on the same data centre as the bot. ↩
Each DC serves its own issuer and consent page. Approve either in Blah — enter your username or Blah Number and tap Approve in the message from the DC service account — or with a listed device signing the exact application request. Device authority changes can end access before a token expires. ↩
A deployment can answer sign-in, sign-up and OAuth at extra domains, each its own OpenID Connect issuer and each able to call an account by its own name. On those domains, as everywhere, a sign-in is confirmed in Blah on a device. ↩
Local accounts register their own applications at /admin, where API hashes and client secrets are shown once and can be rotated. An app’s owner requests a link on the DC’s /admin page, or the app requests one through the application API; the bot’s owner approves through a message from @bot, and nothing changes until they do. Peers owned by that bot remain ordinary chats, visible under the same membership and public-link rules in other clients too. ↩
Calls act as the signed-in account, within its permissions, on peers shared with the app’s linked bot. Newly created peers belong to that account, with the bot added as administrator. Requires the peers scope. Topic CRUD exposes metadata and produces ordinary service messages; deleting a topic deletes its history. The separate bot-token surface sends custom service messages; ordinary message sending and history are unavailable. ↩
Ordinary users to everyone else, but nobody signs up for one: it has no Blah Number and no login address and cannot be given either, and an application reaches it only through the tokens it is created with. New applications start with the DC default limit (100 unless configured otherwise), or unlimited when created by root. A root administrator may change any application’s limit without deleting existing accounts. Removing the application deletes all its managed accounts in the background, resuming after interruptions. Everything they use counts against the account that owns the application, and an auto-delete timer set at creation removes one that falls idle. Independent DCs enforce their own account allowance. Failed creation releases its reserved place in that allowance. ↩
Both are shown once and sign the account in the way a bot token does. The ordinary one sends, reads and keeps track of messages, and may read account information; restricted application service content requires the super token. The super one is what edits the profile, the handle, privacy, and which chats the account is in. The console can rotate either token independently, showing the new value once; the other token stays valid, and current token sessions end. ↩
Either token can open a private conversation with the home DC’s configured support account, subject to ordinary blocks and contact privacy. For every other person, that person must write first; the managed account then answers like any other account. Groups and channels it has been added to are unaffected. ↩
On an independent DC, open /connections and approve with your listed device. Telegram verifies its account, then a second device approval confirms the exact account ID. Linking supports import attribution and contact discovery; it grants no Blah login access and starts no synchronization by itself. Authority changes require fresh approval. ↩
A public name is a domain, such as blah.ing/alice.example.com; the proxy shows it from whichever DC is its holder’s home. ↩
Browsers receive visible message and reaction notifications; silent housekeeping notifications remain app-only. ↩
Files above 10 MiB use Telegram’s large-file upload method. Temporary upload buffers and simultaneous uploads are bounded; clients may receive a retryable flood-wait response while uploading. Reconnecting or retrying a temporary storage-write failure preserves acknowledged parts, so clients can retry the unanswered part. Slow storage does not interrupt an admitted file or album send at the RPC deadline. Connection keepalives remain responsive while uploads wait on storage. ↩