A chat's member list and the list of people who actually live in it are different in kind, not degree. The difference — members on a list versus members who talk — determines everything you do with that audience afterwards.
What a "member" is
Someone who once tapped join. After that, anything: they read daily, they muted it and forgot, they joined for one question and never returned. In a large chat the last two categories are the overwhelming majority — not a quirk of that chat, but how joining works. The threshold for joining is low, so many join and few stay.
What "active" is
Someone who wrote in the chat recently. A single message already establishes that they:
- are alive and using Telegram;
- read this chat;
- find the topic relevant now, not a year ago;
- are willing to write, which makes them likelier to answer you.
Four properties from one message — against a member list, where you know none of them.
How different the lists are
No fixed ratio can be quoted; it depends on the chat, the topic and its age. What can be said honestly: the active list is always several times smaller, and the older the chat, the wider the gap.
The practical conclusion matters more than the ratio. If you used a member list and got a poor response, the cause is usually not your message — it is that you wrote to people who are no longer there.
More precise still: commenters
People who wrote under a specific post. Here you know not just the topic but the exact question that caught their attention. That lets you write a message which does not look like outreach, because it is not: you have a genuine reason.
The middle option: reactions
Leaving a reaction is easier than writing, so the list is larger and the signal weaker. A reasonable compromise when the active list is too small.
Choosing the time window
The key parameter is depth — the period over which activity counts. A week gives the hottest and smallest list, a month is a compromise, six months makes "active" almost indistinguishable from "member".
Start narrow. If there are too few people, widen it — widening is always easier than digging out of responses from the wrong audience.
What these lists do not tell you
Activity in a chat indicates interest in the topic, not readiness to buy. Someone discussing marketing yesterday is not necessarily looking for a contractor. It remains a cold contact — just a cold contact with a real person instead of an empty account.
How Neurogram does this
Everything above is manual work that runs into the number of hours in a day. Neurogram does it on your own accounts and without you: it collects channels and audiences, writes comments and replies with a language model, and keeps limits and quiet hours so the accounts survive. See pricing or look at your case.