No account to make first, nothing to install, no server to own. Message the bot and your workspace is created by that first message. If you already use Ergod in Discord or a browser, link the chat instead and it is the same workspace — same files, same sessions, same usage.
You do not need an Ergod account before you start. Send the bot a message and the workspace behind it is created by that message - the same free tier as every other surface, no card, nothing to download. Your Telegram identity gets its own private workspace, kept separate from everybody else's. If you already have an Ergod account and want Telegram to reach that workspace instead of a new one, link it first - from Account in the dashboard - because once a Telegram identity has a workspace of its own we cannot merge the two. Open @ErgodDev_bot and say anything.
Open Account → Sign-in methods on the dashboard and pick Link Telegram. It opens @ErgodDev_bot with a one-time code already filled in - and that code is what merges this chat into the account you already have, which a plain message cannot do. Telegram is the one surface that cannot have an ordinary sign-in button: a bot has no authorize URL and no callback, so the only proof it can ever get that a chat is yours is a message that chat sends. The code is single use and short lived. After that, Discord, Telegram and the browser all reach one workspace.
The reply appears while the agent is still working, rewriting a single message in place rather than spraying the chat with progress updates - driven by the same state machine Discord and the dashboard read from, not a second copy of it. You get a typing indicator while it thinks, and the finished answer keeps its formatting: headings, lists, links and real code blocks.
Ask for a game and you get the playable .html file in the chat, not a code block to copy out and save yourself. Images arrive as images you can look at without downloading; everything else arrives as a document. This is the part most chat bots skip, and it is the difference between being shown some code and being handed the thing. It works the other way too: send it a photo or a file and the agent reads it - a message does not have to be text.
The browser's full command set - /usage, /tier, /model, /memory, /export and the whole of /session. They appear in Telegram's own command menu, and that menu is built from the command registry rather than typed by hand, so it cannot advertise a command that was renamed or never existed. /export hands the actual files back into the chat as documents.
In a private chat every message is for the bot. In a group you address it by name or by replying to something it said - otherwise it stays quiet. That is not politeness: usage is attributed to whoever spoke, so a bot that answered everything would spend each person's own free usage on conversation nobody pointed at it. When it is first added to a group it posts one short card saying what it is and how to address it, then waits.
Same model, same memory, same 81 tools, same usage window. The tools do not know which door your message came through - a session you start in Telegram is the session you carry on in a browser tab, with the files it already made sitting in the same workspace.
Telegram has no per-message threads, so a long answer stays in the chat rather than moving somewhere quieter. Shared channel workspaces, collaborator invites and per-server admin controls are Discord features. If your group wants one workspace several people work in together, that is still the Discord side. What the Discord version adds.
Link Telegram from the dashboard and your existing files, sessions and usage follow you into the chat. Or just message the bot and start clean.