Creating an official Telegram channel **UPDATED**

Authors: @sixtykeys @Jimmy

Feedback: @mringz

What Is Telegram and Why Does It Matter
Telegram is a cross-platform messaging service with enhanced encryption and privacy features. Today, every solid blockchain project is expected to host its community on Telegram; it has become one of the leading platforms for group communications and discussions in the CeFi and DeFi ecosystem. No other application has gained as much attention as Telegram has from the crypto community. This may be because of the features, security and customer service that telegram has on offer.

Telegram is used by blockchain projects for a number of different reasons. Most projects use it mainly for answering questions about their projects, some use it for communicating to their ICO participants, and some choose Telegram for technical discussions between their team and open-source developers. Telegram is the “go-to” communication tool for projects in the crypto space.

Here at Index Coop, we already have a sprawling Discord community, featuring close to 6,000 members as of this writing. But there is still untapped potential for reaching even more users due to Telegram’s large user base. Telegram has a reported base of “about 500 million active users” as of January 2021 with an aim to get to 1 billion users by 2022; whereas Discord only reports about 150 million active users as of December 2020. Therefore, Telegram presents a huge opportunity to achieve even more engagement with the crypto community at large.

Advantages of Telegram

Community building
Telegram channels are a tool for broadcasting public messages to an unlimited audience. They offer a unique opportunity to reach people directly, sending a notification to their phones with each new post. They are great for one-way communication, announcements, blogging, news, etc. Notice that members cannot post, reply, or send anything in channels, keeping the timeline tidy and free of unnecessary content.
In contrast, Telegram groups are a powerful tool for building communities, with an allowance of up to 200,000 members, which allows for a streamlined channel for information and discussions. Groups allow followers to chat amongst themselves and with community leaders freely.
Furthermore, all the major players, developers, engineers, and influencers in DeFi are already on Telegram, so the target audience is already there. This will also help with onboarding of possible developer and engineering resources, as a large number of them host their discussions on Telegram.

Greater awareness of Coop news
A telegram channel would allow for even greater awareness of the multiple proposals, initiatives, news and official announcements by Index Coop. This will be especially helpful when it comes to IIPs, as some currently struggle to reach quorum. Liquidity providers will also be able to know exactly whenever new pools are launched, and also when those pools are incentivized by liquidity mining rewards.

Comprehensive statistics
Advanced statistics are available for channels with more than 500 subscribers. You can view beautifully-detailed graphs about the growth and the performance of a channel’s posts. Each channel owner can track Telegram metrics: growth rate, engagement rate, muted and unmuted notifications, views by source, source of new followers, the language of members, and much more. This allows us to see how popular the channel is, the growth over time, and whether it might be a good idea to support it with ads.

Core Key Performance Indicators (KPIs)
One of the major goals of the implementation of a Telegram channel and group, is to spread further awareness of Index Coop products, incentivize more people to purchase and hold our products and to further build our community. These goals are in line with our Core KPIs, that is to increase unit supply, total unique holders and protocol revenue.

Other miscellaneous features
These include but are not limited to, view counters, polls and quizzes; scheduled, silent and pinned messages, hashtags etc.

Implementation Proposal

  1. Choose; by voting, community consensus or volunteering, for members of the Coop to become channel and group administrators. I personally volunteer to be a part of this team.
  2. Start Index Coop’s official Telegram announcement channel, main group discussion room and admin room. Generate a fixed invite link to the main room (TheIndexCoop, hasn’t been claimed yet) .
  3. Setup rules by which the community will go by. It’s important to do so, so as to base group moderation on them. The rules will be pinned to the top of the main group for everyone to see.
  4. On the announcement channel give an introduction to Index Coop and its products, explaining how we work, add website links, social media links etc.
  5. Setup of bots (BotFather, Webhook etc.) by admins for whatever functions they deem necessary for the community and for moderation.
  6. As discussion starts and questions about the project are asked, participate as much as possible to answer and explain anything the community members ask. It’s absolutely crucial to be transparent and as informative and supportive as possible.
  7. Tying together all the social media accounts in order to save time and effort and allow messages to get out easily across all of our platforms.
  8. Involve the community in promotion of the Telegram on other social media and other platforms in order to bring attention to the channel.
  9. Once active contributors and participants start to emerge, offer them an admin/moderator role. It’s all about sharing and mutual backup that consolidates the group once it grows bigger.

Telegram will therefore allow us to have an additional platform for Index Coop announcements, discussions and possibly a new way to onboard contributors and high value community members.

Requirements
Implementation of a Telegram channel and group would require minimal resources, and almost no engineering and or developer support. I propose an initial team of 2 to 3 admins, including at least 1 Gold or SIlver owl, and the rest of the admins group can be composed of anyone else who might be interested in the role, ideally a member of the APAC group too, to cover all time zones.

Unofficial channels
These are channels which use the Index Coop name in one way or another on Telegram, but do not have any actual official association with the DAO.

Final Thoughts
Telegram will allow us to have an additional platform for Index Coop announcements, discussions and possibly a new way to onboard contributors and high value community members. Over time, we should expect to see more and more people showing interest, purchasing, holding and actively inquiring about our products. More people will also be joining the community, looking to contribute and help where they can. Index Coop will also see benefit as Telegram is one of the most important social media platforms for community building and discussions of any DAO or cryptocurrency project.

Looking forward to hearing the community’s thoughts and opinions.

Update on Implementation

  1. So far, we are going to have two administrators for the Telegram; Brian (@sixtykeys) and Jimmy (@Jimmy)

  2. We have already started the official Telegram announcement channel, Telegram: Contact @indexcoop, and we encourage all community members to join. A discussion group has also been made, but has been set to private, until a later date.

  3. The administrators have set up the following rules for the channel and the group, these rules are based on the guiding principles of the Index Coop, as well as rules from other community channels.

  • Maintain Decorum - Feel free to talk about all things Index Coop in the main discussion group. Limit discussion to crypto, financial markets/products, and projects affiliated with the Index Coop - but keep all messages civil.
  • Golden Rule - No discrimination, no profanity, no harmful language, no shaming or insulting others. Treat everyone with respect and an open mind.
  • No Inappropriate Behavior - This includes, but is not limited to: personal attacks, threats of violence, gossip, slurs of any kind, posting people’s private information. Lead by example and treat others as you’d like yourself to be treated.
  • No Spamming, Trolling, Shilling, or Scamming - Light self-promotion is fine but please do not spam the channel with self-serving messages, shills, or low effort content. No shilling, no FUD, no misleading information.
  • Inappropriate posts - No pornography, discussion of politics, self-promotion, referral links, pump and dump “signals”, impersonation, tax evasion, or other illegal activity.
  • Strikes & Bans - Anyone found to be directly in violation of the above rules will be issued a warning. If this behavior continues, this will result in immediate suspension/ban at the discretion of the moderators.
  1. Introduction to the Telegram channel has already been made, and Coop announcements will go live starting today.
4 Likes

I am supportive of Index Coop launching a telegram channel.

However, just want to flag @sixtykeys given other more urgent priorities, the POC team will only have a small budget to compensate moderators of the telegram channel.

3 Likes

Fully in favour of setting up a Telegram channel to broaden our reach.

I have reservations on setting up a Telegram group however. Project-based Telegram groups tend to turn into chaotic hell filled with topics wildly ranging from price speculations to technical support. It takes exponentially more effort to moderate, while the benefits are modest as most simply can’t effectively comprehend the criss-crossing discussions.

Agreed.

With the small budget by the POC, moderating would be very difficult if telegram channels are open and a discussion based channels.

With this being said, if we were to have a presence in Telegram. I would prefer an announcement channel to start with and build the audience from there. Then from there we could then see if we have the resources for more channels in Telegram (which requires active moderation).

Also side note; if we decided to open… i think we need to report others non official Telegram accounts that uses the Coop, so that it won’t create confusions for the users.

1 Like

I’m in support of this as well.

@sixtykeys - Can you provide more specifics on the time that it would take to a)implement and b)moderate (as you see it)? Essentially if you put together an initial and monthly budget (in terms of time) I think this could be worthwhile standalone effort that may report-in to POCWG (@Pepperoni_Joe correct me if I’m overstepping); should the community find the cost:benefit of it attractive. Maybe we can spin up a small team, loosely funded via contributor poll, that becomes formalized via the next POC funding request?

Yes I am fully aware of the chaotic nature of telegram groups, but I also feel like they allow for more open ended and free form discussion, which certain people prefer. Telegram also has a number of bots, which actively and autonomously assist in moderation.

But all in all, I believe the channel will be the one that provides the most immediate value.

Yes I agree that based on the budget, and the required resources, starting with just the announcement channel would be ideal. This would only require implementation of the proposal, up until phase 4. The group can be launched at a later date, and also once the announcement channel has gained a decent following.

I will look into what can be done about the non official Telegram accounts.

Thanks for the feedback

Yes, I fully understand, and based on the sentiment in the other comments, this will initially be a standalone effort, which will involve starting just the official announcements channel.

Hi, I’m new here at the Coop (aiming for the internship program), and I’d like to do work in Community Organizing. If the Telegram Channel is open for discussion, I’ll be more than happy to moderate. I can even do it for free since there’s limited budget, and I want to prove myself here.

3 Likes

The plan is to get it up and running before the end of July, just the announcement channel initially. Moderation will be minimal, as we won’t have a group initially.

Will discuss this further with @Pepperoni_Joe

Hey Jimmy, just shoot me a message here or on the discord.

1 Like

@codemathics @caf and I have recently briefly discussed standing up a Telegram channel.

My personal experience on Telegram is largely negative, and I do have the broad concern that starting an Index channel provides an easy method for scammers to take advantage of potential Coop customers. I sent a message in the Quickswap Telegram the other day and received over 20 dms in the next couple hours impersonating employees.

I do recognize that a lot of crypto traffic goes through Telegram, and there could be value add here. I particularly like the way The Defiant runs their announcement channel, and imagine that’s more or less the way to go if we move ahead with this.

4 Likes

Hi All,

Brand new and starting my bronze owl quest and in the process of getting acclimated with the Discord and trying to think of the best way to organize content/discussions.

I don’t think the Coop should try to keep people out of conversations or put walls up, but current permissions seem like “all or nothing” proposals as far as I can see. I’m not familiar enough with telegram discord, or other options, but I was wondering if there is any way like Google Docs to limit different channels, groups, and abilities to different users by permissioning user groups differently (i.e. messaging others on certain channels is only allowed if they are at a certain level and engage with the coop in a few specific ways, etc.) - i.e. Bronze owls can chat in the quests, intro, general, FAQ and a few other channels, then as they finish quests, do tasks and earn more trust they get permissions to different channels. If there is a way to limit people from messaging each other on the server or setting up a separate noob channel maybe, you could then isolate spammy conversations and hopefully reduce time and energy put towards monitoring.

If these permissions are similarly available in a telegram though perhaps you could build the channel infrastructure, have beta and pro users of the various channels and get feedback on how to organize them and what content to host in them (pinned messages, etc) before taking them “live” to larger groups.

I’m sure this was thought about extensively and done the current way for a reason so apologies if similar roll-outs have already been discussed.

To keep in the vein of crypto and decentralization i found Matrix/Element which seemed like an interesting alternative with the bridges they’ve built to other platforms (Element). Maybe the devs could vet this? it has a pro/business plan but not sure how the services differ between products.

I tried out element myself but it was more hands-on (writing HTML code for the welcome page) than i expected: Element

Happy to discuss this more with others prior to a decision/roll-out but as the Coop (both community and active contributors) grows should definitely make sure the next solution can easily support the expected growth/scale.

Here to voice my support for this proposal. Telegram has more user adoption than Discord, especially in crypto. The telegram can be set up in such a way that it reduces spam and scams while maximizing community engagement. I also think it will increase our marketing engagement as if we can build a strong telegram channel we will have more users to promote our products and initiatives in relation to our products. My one recommendation would be to set a target for membership and outline a strategy to meet that target as well.

4 Likes

Yes, I do realize Telegram groups can be quite chaotic, so we are going to start with just an announcement channel up until we have enough controls set in place to better to moderate an active discussion group.

1 Like