Telegram
Overview
Messaging system similar to WhatsApp (but not owned by Facebook!)
Advantages:
- Free, and no ads
- Android App
- IOS App
- Browser app
- Can run behind a firewall, via polling
- Integration built in to Home Assistant
- I was able to set it up in Home Assistant in about 20 minutes start to finish.
- It's open source so you might be able to run your own server and have some degree of privacy and autonomy, but maybe that's not true. I have not looked.
I still had to give it my phone number to get started, but that's sort of how it works. I did not have to let it read files or access my contacts. You only need to do that if you want to use it as a full messaging system with your friends, and I have no friends. Well, none that are messaging geeks anyway. My former friends are already tired of hearing me tell them to install another messaging or VOIP app. In fact they are just tired of hearing from me on all these messaging apps.
Disadvantages:
- It's free and has no monetized base at this time and it could disappear tomorrow. The company is owned by a billionaire who could lose interest and decide to build electric cars or drones or something instead.
- You have to install an app, and possibly convince your friends to install it too.
Notification system
I am going to describe the basics of using it to send notifications from a Linux server to my phone. Please see the "links" section for more information, these are just my notes and not intended to be a complete tutorial on Telegram.
On Home Assistant, I set it up to use polling because I did not feel like setting up yet another proxy. I really am not supposed to expose services to the Internet though so far Spectrum seems less inclined to care than Comcast was.
At work, I used polling too because it was so easy to use in Home Assistant. I currently only want to send messages anyway so it's probably okay.
- Set up an account. Install the app on a phone. Ignore its requests to access contacts and files, you don't need that right now.
- Contact the botfather and set up a bot account. Get a token.
- Get your personal id.
- Put the token and id on your server.
- Send a message from your phone to the server, to establish a link. This lets Telegram know that you are okay receiving messages from your server.
Links
I got the idea to use it from this Random Nerd tutorial.
