Stories and 10 Years of Telegram

Today, Telegram celebrates its 10th birthday – with our biggest update yet. Over the past decade we’ve built hundreds of new features that are now used by over 800 million people. In this update, we launch Stories – with a unique dual camera mode, granular privacy settings, flexible duration options and much more.

September 2023: Telegram channels can also post stories, thanks to a new boost system. Read more »

Telegram Stories

Stories let you quickly share moments and see more from your friends – and they're now available on Telegram.

This was by far the most-requested feature in the history of Telegram – and we've spent several months innovating and refining the format. Telegram Stories have all the things you'd expect – and plenty more that have never been done before.

Stories are displayed in an expandable section at the top of your screen – so you still see the full length of your chat list and folders.

When viewing a story, you can quickly tap to share, reply privately, or react – tap for a quick or hold down to use hundreds more reactions.

By default, you'll see stories from all your contacts on your home page – and you can hide stories from specific contacts, sending them to your archived chats.

Dual Camera Mode

To capture scenes from every angle, stories can take photos or videos with both the front and rear camera of your device simultaneously – letting you choose which camera goes where, even while recording.

Stickers, Locations and Captions

Stories use Telegram's powerful media editor – allowing you to add text, drawings, stickers or tag your location. For even more context, stories support captions – where you can include a longer text description, tag friends or add links.

You can add multiple images from your gallery – or use search to find GIFs and pictures from the web.

Granular Privacy Settings

When posting a story, you can select from 4 privacy settings: Everyone, My Contacts, Close Friends and Selected Contacts. Each option can be completely customized, allowing you to include or exclude any users.

You can also select a list of users who will never see your story – so your boss or grandma won't find out about your adventurous side.

To keep a story even more private, you can disable screenshots to prevent viewers from saving or sharing it.

Stories in Profiles

Stories can last for your choice of 6, 12, 24 or 48 hours. You can also post them to your profile, arranged in a gorgeous grid — where both old contacts and new connections can see your highlight reel for as long as you want.

Now when you meet people on Telegram, you'll see exciting snapshots of their life – not just a few profile photos.

Each story that you post to your profile has separate privacy settings – so you can always control which ones certain people are able to see.

Editing Stories

For the first time in the history of social media, you can update any element of your story at any time – changing its visibility, caption, on-screen text, stickers or anything else – without having to delete and repost it from scratch.

To edit your story, open it on the device you posted it from and tap ⋮ or ⋯ > Edit Story.

Detailed View Statistics

When a user opens a story, they appear in a list of viewers that is visible to the story's author – like a read receipt.

After you post a story, you can open it to see the list – which you can filter to show just your contacts, and sort by recent views first or reactions first. If you want to check if a specific user saw it, type their name into the search bar.

For more anonymity, Premium users can enable Stealth Mode – erasing their views from any stories they opened in the past 5 minutes, and hiding what they view for the next 25 minutes.

…and More

To see all the story features that couldn't fit in this blog post, check out this detailed guide to Telegram Stories.

Thank you all for 10 great years. If you feel like celebrating some more, check out our CEO’s thoughts on the occasion

Meanwhile, we're already working on the next update, cake in hand.

August 14, 2023
The Telegram Team