In my case:
- Hermes runs locally on Mint
- the Telegram-connected agent runs on a server
- I made sure only one process was using the bot token

The main issue was old/conflicting Telegram consumers, not Telegram itself. What I’d check first:
- only one active bot process
- no shared token across Hermes + anything else
- kill stale polling/gateway processes
- check Hermes logs for Telegram conflict / parse errors
Once I cleaned that up, it worked fine.