Telegram's not dead, it's just that just me and a couple others are in there. Never got a lot of interest.
Regarding telegram replies, I'm traveling right now. While I was traveling, the server went down. I run my witness and everything out of my research org in AZ. I'm the only one running it. It's really unfortunate that something like this would happen the second I leave. I'll be back later tonight to get the app back up again.
Also, it is OSS, and you can set up with docker, but the idea is that I provide the infrastructure so it's not necessary. Thanks for the interest.
Keep checking in to the telegram.