🤫 LEAK: UNDER THE HOOD OF TELEGRAM STORIES

👉 READ MORE ABOUT TELEGRAM STORIES 👈

How will Telegram stories work?

A source has revealed the underlying implementation of stories in Telegram. Similar to forums, Telegram has taken an existing format and wrapped it in a beautiful interface.

In Layer 160, when publishing the first story, a special channel is created using the channels.createChannel method, with the stories flag [flags.6?true]. It's not possible to create more than one such channel simultaneously, but the channel can be deleted and recreated using the API. The channel now has the stories property in the channel constructor [flags.31?true]. This channel has no invitation links or username, and they cannot be assigned to it. The channel is not counted against any of the limits on the number of chats and channels. This channel has a non-disableable 24-hour timer.

The publishing system, reporting, delayed messages, and comments are inherited from channels. Publication is done through messages.sendMedia, where the video is uploaded like a regular message, but the inputMediaUploadedDocument attribute has the story flag set. The video must be in MPEG4 format, with one side being at least 800px and the width not exceeding the height. Video cropping to fit the screen size happens on the client side.

A chat can be attached to this channel, just like a regular channel (messages.setDiscussionGroup). If no chat is attached to the channel, the apps will send comments as private messages to the author.

The channel is returned as a channel constructor in the user constructor.

In the messages.getDialogs method, folder_id=2 has been added for the list of contacts' stories.

The app retrieves the list of user stories using the messages.searchSentMedia method with the inputMessagesFilterVideo filter. This implies a limitation of showing the last 100 visible stories. Stories will support deep links, and the story ID will be the post ID in the channel.

Currently, any type of post, even text posts, can be published directly to such a channel via MTProto. It's likely that this will be fixed before the release, but these posts do not affect the functionality of stories.

@ebinfo