fluid-telegram/docs/provisioning.md

Declared presence — provisioning the Telegram surface

FT-WP-0001 T01–T03 were written as human steps: register a bot through BotFather, create two channels, generate a salt. This document replaces that route with a declared specification and a reconciler, and states honestly which part of it cannot be automated and why.

The constraint that shapes everything

The Bot API cannot create a bot or a channel. It can only act as one. Both acts are client capabilities, reachable only through MTProto with a user account — Canon INT-03, "capabilities unavailable through the Bot API".

So the provisioner is an MTProto client acting as a designated operator account. It messages BotFather the way a person would, and it calls channels.createChannel the way a client would.

Three things genuinely cannot be derived from a specification:

Human step	Why	Frequency
A Telegram account for the operator	Requires a phone number and a device	Once
api_id / api_hash	Issued by a web form at my.telegram.org	Once
The login code (and 2FA password) that mints the MTProto session	Telegram sends it out of band, by design	Once, and again if the session is revoked

Everything else — bot registration, naming, description, avatar, channel creation, visibility, administrator rights, the redaction salt — is declared and reconciled.

That is the honest boundary. This is not "no human steps"; it is one bounded bootstrap, then a declared surface that converges.

Those steps are not left to improvisation. docs/seeding-runbook.md guides them: what to have ready, what to do, what to record and where, and — for each one — why it could not be automated. A manual step is acceptable when it is guided, repeatable and bounded, and unacceptable when it is merely undocumented.

Worth distinguishing two reasons a step resists automation, because they age differently. A KYC check resists by design; automating it would defeat its purpose, and a component weak enough to permit it is a defect rather than an opportunity. A web form that mints an API key resists only incidentally, because nobody built the endpoint. All three Telegram steps are the second kind — none is a fraud control — so each is a candidate for removal the moment the platform changes.

Where the specification lives

The presence spec is editorial, not mechanical. It carries the bot's name, its description, its avatar, and the channel titles a stranger will read. That is brand, and brand belongs to the campaign:

pr-hall-of-helix/presence/telegram.yaml     # the declared presence  (campaign owns)
fluid-telegram/presence/telegram.schema.yaml # the schema it validates against
fluid-telegram/presence/resolved/<campaign>.yaml  # what provisioning produced

The provisioner takes a spec path as its input, so this interface stays reusable by any HelixForge campaign rather than being about the Hall of Helix. It follows the split FT-WP-0001 T13 already draws: what to say belongs to the campaign; how it is carried and proven belongs here.

The two planes

  provisioning plane                    request path
  ------------------                    ------------
  operator (human) triggers             pr-hall-of-helix
      |                                     |
      v                                     v  POST /v1/channel-posts
  provision plan  ──▶ human reads ──▶ apply  fluid-core ──▶ adapter ──▶ Bot API
      |                                                        (post_messages only)
      v
  MTProto as operator account
  BotFather · channels.createChannel · channels.editAdmin

They share nothing but OpenBao and the resolved-state file. The adapter has no provisioning code path and no MTProto session. It holds a bot token with post_messages and nothing else, so a compromised adapter cannot create, rename, delete or re-permission anything.

This is what keeps the scheme inside InterfaceEvolutionIntent.md §7, which forbids the Daimon from creating channels or bots or changing permissions. The provisioner is not the Daimon: it is operator-triggered, it is outside the request path, and every run is a plan a person approved. §7's prohibition is on autonomous administration, and nothing here is autonomous.

plan / apply

Terraform's shape, deliberately, because the semantics are already understood.

• plan reads the spec, reads live Telegram state through MTProto, reads the resolved-state file, and prints a diff. It writes nothing.
• apply executes a plan the operator approved. It is idempotent: a second apply over an unchanged spec is a no-op, and every action is keyed on a resolved id rather than on a name.

Reconciliation is converging, never destructive:

• The provisioner has no destroy path. Deleting a channel destroys its subscribers and its post history irreversibly, and no specification is worth trusting with that. Removing a channel from the spec produces a warning, not a deletion.
• Drift on a destructive field reports and stops. If a channel's username has been taken over, or the bot has been demoted, apply says so and exits non-zero. It does not "fix" its way through a situation it does not understand.
• Administrator rights are clamped, not declared. The provisioner grants post_messages and refuses to grant anything else even if the spec asks for it. A spec requesting can_delete_messages fails validation. The intent forbids the system from holding a right it is not allowed to exercise, so the safe place to enforce that is where the right is granted.
• The private test channel is created before the public one, and apply refuses to touch the public channel until the private one has recorded a successful test publication. Canon PUB-01, and FT-WP-0001 T02.

Secrets

Nothing sensitive enters the spec or the resolved state. Both are committed.

Secret	Path	Rule
MTProto session string	bao:.../telegram/operator-session	Provisioning only. Never given to the adapter.
api_id / api_hash	bao:.../telegram/operator-app	Provisioning only.
Bot token	bao:.../telegram/bot-token	Written by apply the moment BotFather issues it, read by the adapter at start. Never logged, never echoed, not even in error text.
Redaction salt	bao:.../telegram/redaction-salt	Create-if-absent, never overwrite.

The salt rule is a hard one. docs/observation.md explains why: rotating it silently invalidates every longitudinal comparison the interface has ever made, and it does so without any visible failure. So the provisioner generates it once if it is missing and will not replace it — the only way to change it is a deliberate human write to OpenBao, which is a decision, not a run.

What provisioning produces

presence/resolved/<campaign>.yaml, committed, no secrets:

resolved:
  campaign: hall-of-helix
  spec_digest: "sha256:..."      # the spec this state came from
  provisioned_at: "..."
  bot:
    username: "..."
    id: 123456789
  channels:
    test:   { chat_id: -100..., username: null,  admin_rights: [post_messages] }
    public: { chat_id: -100..., username: "...", admin_rights: [post_messages] }

This is what the adapter's configuration is derived from, and what plan diffs against. spec_digest is the link that makes drift detectable: if the spec changed and the digest did not, provisioning is behind.

Rate and account safety

Automating a user account is not what Telegram's terms are written around. Three mitigations, all cheap:

• Use a dedicated operator account, never a person's own. If it is limited, nothing personal is lost.
• The provisioner runs at human pace — it is a reconciler that runs on change, not a loop. BotFather conversations are rate-limited to one exchange at a time with real delays between messages.
• The session publishes nothing. All ordinary traffic goes through the bot token on the Bot API, which is the supported surface. The user session exists only to do the three things the Bot API cannot.

Open question for the operator

InterfaceEvolutionIntent.md §7 lists channel and bot creation under "explicit non-authority" without distinguishing the Daimon from an operator-run tool. The reading above — that §7 constrains autonomous action, and an approved plan is not autonomous — is the intended one, but it is currently a reading rather than something the document says. A one-sentence clarification in §7 would settle it. That is a governance edit to a constitutional document, so it is proposed here rather than made.