A Telegram Channel with a Hashtag Is Always at Hand — Found in One Tap

You have channels about work and channels for downtime in the same list. You open the crypto channel several times a day, the cooking channel once a week, when there’s time to cook. As long as these are Telegram subscriptions, folders keep them on separate screens: the list you need is always at hand. The moment you switch to short summaries, all sources start arriving in one personal chat with the bot. You want to catch up specifically on this week’s recipes — and run into one shared feed where crypto, work, and everything else are mixed together.

A personal hashtag on a source gives the channel instant findability back. Tap the tag under any summary from that source, and Telegram’s built-in search opens, already filtered by that tag, right inside the chat with the bot. The channel appears in front of you with one tap, whenever you decide to get to it. And if one tag is set on several channels at once, the same tap opens the whole group at once.

For that tap to actually save time, there should be few tags, and they should be tied not to a topic but to the reason for reading. A detailed catalog of topics — “crypto,” “DeFi,” “macroeconomics,” “recipes,” “baking”… — doesn’t work here: there are always more topics than there are reasons to open them. You read one source about crypto urgently, because it covers a fresh piece of news, and another source on the same crypto once a week, with no urgency: same topic, different reason. Set up a tag for every topic, and a search on it will return sources, but won’t tell you when to get to them. A few tags for a reading occasion — “urgent,” “once a week,” “work” — keep exactly what you’ll actually open together within one tap.

In «Essence» Bot, this is done by personal source hashtags:

• A hashtag is created in the source list: up to 20 regardless of plan, name up to 32 characters. One source can be included in several hashtags at once — for example, a channel with urgent crypto news can be marked both “urgent” and “work.”
• The hashtag is shown next to the source in the list and under every personal summary delivered after it was linked. Tap the tag under a summary, and Telegram’s built-in search for that tag opens in the chat with the bot.
• After importing a Telegram folder, the bot suggests a hashtag for its channels on its own — you can accept the suggested name, change it, or pick an existing hashtag instead of a new one.

It’s also worth understanding right away what hashtags don’t do:

• A hashtag is assigned to the whole source, not to individual posts on a topic: every summary from that source ends up under the tag, regardless of what a specific post is about — the hashtag doesn’t filter by topic within a channel.
• A tag doesn’t apply retroactively. Summaries received before a source was linked to a hashtag don’t get that tag. This also applies to the very first summaries right after importing a folder — while the suggested tag hasn’t been confirmed yet. Such summaries can’t be found by searching the tag.
• Hashtags are visible only in the personal chat with the bot. They don’t appear in the web feed or in auto-posting.
• A hashtag can’t be renamed after it’s created.
• Deleting a hashtag doesn’t affect summaries already delivered.
• Removing a source erases its links to hashtags. Adding the source back doesn’t restore the links automatically — they need to be created again.

The practical takeaway: don’t try to plan out an exhaustive catalog of topics in advance. Start with two or three tags for your actual reasons to read — “urgent,” “on weekends,” “work” — and add sources to them as you go, rather than from a pre-made list of subscriptions.