chathop

Forwards messages from one chat to others.
Each destination gets its own filters and caption rules.

Runs on Telegram Serverless — no host, no database to rent, nothing to keep alive.

Commands

/set (source) (destination)	Add a forward
/get (source)	List your destinations for a source, or all of them with /get
/rm (source) (destination)	Remove one of your destinations, or all with /rm (source)
/reload	Refresh the chat names shown in /get
/cancel	Stop a half-finished /set
/settings	Open the Mini App
/help	How it works

Anyone can use it, and everyone's routes are their own. You must administer the destination — posting into a chat is what needs authority. For a source, you have to be in the chat yourself unless it is public, and the bot has to be in it too — an administrator, in a channel — to see the messages at all.

Whoever claims the bot administers it, and gets two more commands:

/private on|off	Keep the bot to yourself; everyone else's routes go quiet
/transfer (user id)	Hand the bot over, after confirming on a button

Nobody runs a fresh bot until someone says so: /claim takes charge of it while it is unclaimed, and /claim (bot token) takes it back at any time — holding the token from @BotFather is the proof of ownership, so there is no secret to configure and no way to lock yourself out by mistyping an id in /transfer. The message carrying the token is deleted on sight.

Anywhere a chat is expected you can pass a chat id, an @username or a t.me link — including a message link, which yields the chat it belongs to. Invite links carry no id and are rejected.

Deploying your own

bun install
bunx tgcloud login     # paste the CLI token from @BotFather → your bot → Serverless
bun run deploy         # build the Mini App, push it and the bot's code
bunx tgcloud migrate   # create the tables

push prints the Mini App's address — https://app<your bot id>.tgcloud.ai/. The bot id is the app id, so nothing needs configuring.

deploy ends by running endpoints/setup, which tells Telegram the bot's command list, its description, and the menu button that opens the Mini App. There is nothing to set by hand in @BotFather, and nothing to remember after changing a command — it is applied on the next deploy, and skipped when nothing changed.

Known limits

• Albums arrive as separate messages. Parts land in different invocations and there is no process to hold them together.
• Patterns run on native RegExp, not RE2. A pattern with a repeated group inside a repeated group is refused at save time; that is a heuristic, not the linear-time guarantee RE2 gave.
• One bot per project. A project is tied to one bot, and only that bot can hold the webhook, so there is no way to run a second bot's updates here.
• Commands work in a private chat with the bot, not in groups.
• Chat names and avatars are stored, not looked up. They refresh when a chat announces itself — the bot added or removed, a rename — and on /reload. Avatars load after the list, never with it.

Licence

GPL-3.0-or-later.

The icons are other people's work: the outline glyphs are Lucide (ISC, parts MIT), the bot's own mark is "send" by Keval from the Noun Project (CC BY), and GitHub's mark comes from Simple Icons (CC0).