contest-bot — a Telegram bot is my Digital Freedom submission

I built a Telegram bot in 20 minutes. It accepts video submissions for a Digital Freedom Contest — TikTok, YouTube, Instagram, Snapchat, X. Validates links. Stores submissions in SQLite. Renders an SVG knowledge graph of every entry, grouped by platform, with status dots and stats.

Then I made a video about it. The video is the submission. And the bot is the submission too. This is a post about what that loop feels like, and why I think the medium is the message here — not just a McLuhan quote you throw around at parties.

A terminal window showing the contest bot running

the bot

900 lines of Python. python-telegram-bot, sqlite3, ultragraph for the SVG viz. The conversation flow is a state machine: pick a contest → answer two questions → paste links → validated → done. /admin shows stats. /admin graph builds a knowledge graph from the submissions table and renders it as an SVG — submissions as nodes, platforms as column headers, edges colored by status.

It lives at github.com/peterlodri-sec/telegram-contest. Open source. MIT. Fork it.

git clone https://github.com/peterlodri-sec/telegram-contest
cd telegram-contest
cp .env.example .env   # add your bot token
uv run contest-bot

The bot uses ultragraph under the hood for the knowledge graph — my own byte-graph library that is a 1-bit ternary LLM. The same library that ships the 196 KB Hungarian history model and the Anonymus byte-level transformer. Here it's doing something much simpler: building a sparse tree of submissions and rendering an SVG of the whole thing. It's the kind of use I built the library for — small, concrete, visual.

the video

The script writes itself:

Hook: Terminal open. uv run contest-bot. "This bot collected your submission. I built it in 20 minutes. The bot IS my submission."

Why loops: Cut to ultragraph, ultrawhale, kompress. "I build self-improving systems. Open loops. Digital freedom is freedom TO build, not just freedom FROM surveillance."

Personal anchor: "I'm from Tatabánya, Hungary. My grandfather grew up in a country where you couldn't publish freely. That's one generation away."

The thesis: "Freedom without accountability is anarchy. Accountability without freedom is control. You need both."

CTA: "Fork the bot. Change it. Run your own contest. That's digital freedom."

Full script with shot directions, platform cuts, and production guide is in the repo at VIDEO_SCRIPT.md.

why this is a loop, not a post

Every piece of this feeds the next piece:

I build the bot → the bot collects submissions
I make a video about the bot → the video is a submission in the bot
The video explains why open source matters → the bot is open source
The CTA says "fork it" → someone forks it → new contest → new submissions

That's a closed loop. The thing and the thing about the thing are the same thing.

I call this loop engineering — a phrase I keep coming back to. Not because it sounds cool (though it does), but because it's literally what I build: systems where the output feeds the input. The bot accepts submissions about digital freedom using infrastructure that is itself an example of digital freedom. The recursion is the point.

the honest question

The Vaked genesis ceremony asked: "What is missing to fully utilize LLMs and help them become not just self-aware, rather honest?"

I don't have an answer yet. But I think part of it is: stop building things about freedom and start building the infrastructure of freedom. A manifesto is a PDF. A bot is a repo. A repo can be forked.

That's the difference between talking about the loop and living in it.

This post was dictated from voice notes and shaped into prose. The ideas, the bot, and the video are mine; the synthesis is the loop in action.

the bot

the video

why this is a loop, not a post

the honest question

Further reading