Topic-wise Exploration of the Telegram Group-verse

Although Telegram is currently one of the most popular instant messaging apps in the world, previous studies have mainly focused on analysing discussions on specific angles and topics. In this paper, we present a broad analysis of publicly accessible groups that cover a wide range of discussions, including Education, Erotic, Politics, and Cryptocurrencies. How do people interact with different topic groups? Is there any common or peculiar behaviour? We engineer and offer an open-source tool to automate the collection of messages from Telegram groups, a non-straightforward problem. We use it to collect more than 51 million messages from 669 groups. Here, we present a first-of-its-kind, per-topic analysis, contrasting the users' activity patterns from different angles - the language, the presence of bots, the type and volume of shared media content, links to external platforms, etc. Our results confirm some anecdotal evidence, e.g., indications of spamming behaviour, and unveil some unexpected findings, e.g., the different sharing patterns of video and message length in groups of different topics. Our research provides a horizontal analysis of the public group in Telegram across various general topics, establishing a foundation for future studies that can delve deeper into user interactions and content dynamics within this unique messaging environment.