FetchBot News

FetchBot News pinned «Well, Telegram has doubled down on their username tomfoolery. I got in touch with support to inquire about one of my usernames, and they told me to send in an email to try and recover it on the basis of trademark law. Nine days later, not only have I not heard…»

Well, Telegram has doubled down on their username tomfoolery. I got in touch with support to inquire about one of my usernames, and they told me to send in an email to try and recover it on the basis of trademark law. Nine days later, not only have I not heard back, but I have just discovered that they're now trying to sell my username on their crypto platform. Very cool!

I have taken the hard decision to shut down FetchBot. This bot has taken me hundreds of hours to build and polish, and I feel like I shouldn't give away my work for free for a platform that has shown this level of disregard for their community.

I apologize for the inconvenience.

FetchBot News pinned «I usually don't use this channel for anything other than FetchBot news, but recent developments from Telegram are making me feel like I need to speak up. The Telegram team recently revoked usernames from "inactive" channels without no communication whatsoever…»

I usually don't use this channel for anything other than FetchBot news, but recent developments from Telegram are making me feel like I need to speak up.

The Telegram team recently revoked usernames from "inactive" channels without no communication whatsoever - to the point that we don't know whether our usernames were taken away, and we don't know what the criteria is.

One of my channels was affected - and it initially seemed reasonable enough, the channel had not been used for a while, and mostly existed to keep a handle on our trademark until we had updates to share. FWIW, the name was unique enough that it wouldn't have clashed with other users.

I initially assumed good faith, and that it was an attempt to clear out squatters from the global namespace. But the fact is that Telegram indiscriminately took away "usernames"/short URLs from many people, without even notifying them. That's already bad enough.

It does get worse, though - recent news from @durov's channel are making it seem like it's an attempt to cash in on having a "novelty" username, by turning them into auctions and following the "Web3" model. From my point of view, this goes against some of the principles that Telegram claimed to stand for, and seems like an attempt at a cash grab.

Pavel Durov announced this on his official channel over at @durov, and the backlash was so big that he opted to disable reactions in the channel as a whole.

I'm personally hoping that the Telegram team will walk this decision back and allow us to take back our short handles. But if this plan goes forward, and they start gating "interesting usernames" behind an auction, without even giving a chance to long-standing users, I will personally unsubscribe from Premium and shut down this bot, in an act of protest.

If you disagree with these decisions, please get in touch with Telegram Support and make your voice heard. I know they are already aware their idea is unpopular, but more voices can always help.

Well, that didn't work. But... holy crap, folks, I think I've figured it out! I was reading through the code for the bot again, planning to rewrite it from scratch, and suddenly I finally noticed the bug that's probably causing the bot to freeze!

It turns out it wasn't a Python bug at all, but rather a bug in the way I was handling multithreading. I initially created this bot just for myself, and never expected many people to be using it, especially all at the same time; so the code was designed in a way that wasn't really appropriate for the amount of requests per second we're now getting.

I rewrote that piece of code to handle simultaneous requests more gracefully, and I strongly believe this will fix the freeze issue we've been seeing with FetchBot for the past months - finally!! Not only that, but it should actually improve response times and download speeds when the bot is under heavy load. Good news all around!

As always, let me know if anything goes wrong. But I'm feeling pretty hopeful about this update 🤞

A few people have asked me whether the launch of Telegram Premium will change anything for FetchBot users, so I thought I'd post a little public note on that: at this point in time, the FetchBot experience will remain the same as it's always been.

I asked the Telegram team whether my bot would be able to opt into the doubled file size limit if I'm signed up for Premium but they've told me that's not the case yet.

Should this change in the future, all FetchBot users will be able to download videos up to 4 GB. I have no plans to gate any features behind Premium, and the bot will continue to be ad-free for everyone, just like it's always been.

Deployed a little fix to maybe, hopefully, stop the bot from freezing every couple of days. It's a deadlock inside Python code for some unexplained reason. If you're good at Python (and familiar with its internals) hit me up and maybe we'll be able to figure it out together! For now, time to cross fingers.

Deezer has made some changes to their API and music downloads have been unreliable for the past few days. I believe I have figured out what has changed and rolled out an update that may, or may not, fix the issue. Works fine for me so far. Happy downloading!

And we're back! Only 12 hours late! 👍

FetchBot is currently undergoing a server migration, and is therefore down. No ETA available, hoping it will be done within 12 hours!

You can choose multiple, and if your most desired feature is not in this poll, message me at @granpc and I will hear you out.

yt-dlp has been updated to the latest version. This brings back support for TikTok videos (without the watermark!) and probably fixes a bunch of other issues. As usual, let me know if something appears to be broken.

FetchBot has just crossed a milestone: 150 thousand videos have been downloaded for over six thousand users to date. Over 1500 new videos are downloaded every day - and those numbers are getting bigger by the day. And all of this has been done without showing one single advertisement nor collecting any user information. Pretty cool, huh? :)

And the update is now complete! Everything seems to be working as expected. If you run into any issues, don't hesitate to get in touch with me at @GranPC and I'll look into it. Thank you for flying FetchBot!

FetchBot is currently being updated to the latest version of tdlib, in order to be able to service new Telegram users with an user ID above 2³². Expect some instability and downtime in the coming hours - but we'll be back and better than ever!

I have deployed a new method that allows us to download music in high quality once more - and faster than ever. 320k goodness within two seconds! Enjoy, and as usual, let me know if you have any feedback.

Reddit has started blocking bots from downloading videos from their website. I have deployed a temporary workaround to get Reddit downloads working again - but there is a chance it may negatively affect other sites. Please let me know if that seems to be the case.

It looks like Deezer has now disabled free accounts from being able to download music in high quality, so I have switched the music download quality to MP3@128kbps. Not happy about this, but there's not much else I can do. Sorry for the inconvenience!

PS: FetchBot now has support for downloading music, similar to bots such as Music Hunters. It is experimental and a bit slow, but it works like a charm.