Telethon is alive on Codeberg. Its GitHub repo has been archived since February

Here is how most of us decide whether a library is safe to depend on: open its GitHub page, look at the last commit, glance at open issues, check the stars. Thirty seconds, and you have an answer.

For the two most used Telegram libraries in Python, that answer is now wrong.

What the numbers say

Every figure below came from a public API on 16 September 2026 between 22:00 and 22:05 UTC, and every one of them was still standing when it was read again on 17 September.

Telethon did not die. It moved. The newest commit on Codeberg, dated 14 Sept 2026, is titled «Add missing parameters to friendly message methods», and the release before it bumped the version to 1.45. Meanwhile the GitHub page that every tutorial links to has one open issue, because an archived repo cannot receive new ones.

Pyrogram is the opposite case. The repo is archived, the last release on PyPI is from April 2023, and the documentation site still reads like the project is current. Nothing tells a newcomer that the last three years happened.

GramJS is the strangest of the three. Nearly nine hundred thousand downloads a month, against an archived repository. Nobody is watching that dependency, and almost everyone writing Telegram code in JavaScript is standing on it.

Why this matters more than it looks

Your bug report goes nowhere. An archived repo has issues disabled. If you hit a bug in Telethon today and file it where the stars are, you are filing it into a museum.

New developers pick the wrong signal. Someone starting a Telegram project this week searches, lands on the archived page, sees «archived» and concludes the whole ecosystem is dead. The opposite conclusion, «4,616 stars, must be fine», is equally wrong for Pyrogram.

Your assistant will be confidently wrong. Coding assistants lean on what GitHub says. Ask one whether Telethon is maintained and you will get an answer built on an archived page.

Tutorials keep pointing at the museum. Search results for Telegram scraping are dominated by proxy vendors publishing the same walkthrough. None of them updated the link.

How to actually check whether a library is alive

Four checks, none of which involve looking at stars.

1. Ask the package registry, not the repo. pypi.org/pypi//json gives you the upload time of the current version. For npm, api.npmjs.org/downloads/point/last-month/. A release from last week beats a repo badge from last year.
2. Find where the maintainer actually works. For Telethon that is Codeberg. The clue is usually in the README of the archived repo or in the maintainer's profile, and it is worth thirty seconds.
3. Read the download trend, not the total. A package with steady monthly downloads and no releases is a risk you are taking on purpose. A package with both is fine.
4. Check whether issues are even open. One open issue on a 12,000-star project usually means the tracker is closed, not that the bugs ran out.

The decision underneath all this

There is a question hiding behind «which library should I use», and it is worth asking out loud: do you need a Telegram session at all?

If you are building a bot that acts as itself, yes, and you should go with the library that is actually maintained, which today means Telethon from Codeberg, pinned to a version you tested.

If all you need is to read public channels, a session is a liability you took on by accident. It means a phone number, a session file that is worth stealing, FLOOD_WAIT timers you did not plan for, and an account that can be limited while you sleep. Plenty of projects carry that risk without ever needing the powers it buys them.

We built tgAtlas for the second case: public channels over HTTP, no phone number, no session file. It reads posts with view and forward counts, the discussion threads under them, and channel metadata. If you are in the first case, ignore us and go star the Codeberg mirror, codeberg.org/Lonami/Telethon. It had 132 stars on 17 September 2026, and it is the one doing the work.