I forget the context but the other day I also learned about Snowflake IDs [1] that are apparently used by Twitter, Discord, Instagram, and Mastodon.

Timestamp + random seems like it could be a good tradeoff to reduce the ID sizes and still get reasonable characteristics, I'm surprised the article didn't explore there (but then again "timestamps" are a lot more nebulous at universal scale I suppose). Just spitballing here but I wonder if it would be worthwhile to reclaim ten bits of the Snowflake timestamp and use the low 32 bits for a random number. Four billion IDs for each second.

There's a Tom Scott video [2] that describes Youtube video IDs as 11-digit base-64 random numbers, but I don't see any official documentation about that. At the end he says how many IDs are available but I don't think he considers collisions via the birthday paradox.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Snowflake_ID

[2]: https://youtu.be/gocwRvLhDf8

There also DRUUID: https://gist.github.com/bricss/53e5babedf44bf3ab71334c15102e...

> [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Snowflake_ID

Isn't this just the same scheme as version 1 UUID, except with half the bits? I guess they didn't want to dedicate 128 bits to their IDs.

That also looks like the widely used BSON ids, to anyone else interested

Getting the entire universe to agree on a single clock for creating timestamps sounds absurdly difficult. Probably impossible?