The key facts

  • The Telegram beta for macOS 13.0 has gained a News tab with a unified feed of channel posts
  • The feed is divided into Added (the user's channels) and For You (interest-based recommendations) sections
  • The feature has not been officially announced; launch timing and support for other platforms are unknown

New News tab in the macOS beta

The Telegram beta for macOS, version 13.0, has gained a separate News tab with channel publications in the format of a unified feed. The feature was reported by the Telegram channels “1337” and teleLakel. Currently, posts in Telegram are displayed in chronological order, and to view them you need to open each channel separately; the messenger has never had an algorithm that selects posts based on the user's interests.

Added and For You sections

The feed consists of two sections. Added shows posts from channels the user is subscribed to — according to Spot.uz citing the “1337” channel — or channels that the user will be able to add and remove themselves, as Spot.uz writes citing teleLakel. The For You section displays personalized recommendations; it is assumed that posts from channels the user is not subscribed to may also appear there, but this remains unclear. Each category of publications will get its own name and emoji, and users will be able to choose and change categories for showing recommendations. It is unknown what algorithm will be used to form the feed.

Additional features

The News tab has a search bar, an indicator of new posts, and a button for marking publications as read. From the feed, you can open posts and channels directly, go to chats, and copy links. For quick viewing, there is preloading of images (including avatars), videos, and stories.

History of attempts and feature status

According to the Telegram Info channel, back in early 2018 Telegram tested combining channels into a unified news feed in the macOS beta, but soon disabled the feature on the service side. From 2019 to 2021, the developers held contests on news ranking, dividing news into clusters, and determining the language and topic of channels. In April 2022, code for a news feed feature was found in the official iOS client repository, but it again did not appear in releases.

Uncertainty around the launch

Telegram has not officially announced the new tab. Since beta features undergo testing and may work incorrectly, it is unknown whether News will appear in the final version and in what form. The launch timing, as well as plans to roll it out to iOS, Android, and Windows, have not been announced.