Snowflake ID
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Snowflake ID | |
| Other names | Twitter Snowflake X Snowflake |
Snowflake IDs, or snowflakes, are a form of unique identifier used in distributed computing. The format was created by X (formerly Twitter) and is used for the IDs of tweets.[1] It is popularly believed that every snowflake has a unique structure, so they took the name "snowflake ID". The format has been adopted by other companies, including Discord and Instagram. The Mastodon social network uses a modified version.
Format
[edit]A snowflake is composed of 64 bits:
- The highest-order bit is always 0.
- The next 10 bits represent a machine ID, preventing clashes.
- The next 12 more bits represent a per-machine sequence number, to allow creation of multiple snowflakes in the same millisecond.
Only 63 bits are variable, so that a non-negative number can be processed readily as a 64-bit signed integer; the final number is generally serialized textually as a decimal number.[2]
Snowflakes are sortable by time, because they are based on the time they were created.[2] Additionally, the time a snowflake was created can be calculated from the snowflake. This can be used to get snowflakes (and their associated objects) that were created before or after a particular date.[3]
| Offsets | Octet | 0 | 1 | 2 | 3 | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Octet | Bit | 0 | 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | 11 | 12 | 13 | 14 | 15 | 16 | 17 | 18 | 19 | 20 | 21 | 22 | 23 | 24 | 25 | 26 | 27 | 28 | 29 | 30 | 31 | |
| 0 | 0 | 0 | Timestamp - first 31 bits | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| 4 | 32 | Timestamp - last 10 bits | Machine ID | Machine Sequence Number | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Example
[edit]A tweet produced by @Wikipedia in February 2025[4] has the snowflake ID 1888944671579078978. The number may be converted to binary as 0001 1010 0011 0110 1110 0001 0010 1011 1011 0101 11 | 01 0110 1000 | 0001 0100 0010, with pipe symbols denoting the three parts of the ID.
- The first 41 (+ 1 top zero bit) bits convert to decimal as 450359504599. Add the value to the X Epoch of 1288834974657 (in Unix time milliseconds),[5] the Unix time of the tweet is therefore 1739194479256: February 10, 2025 13:34:39.256 UTC.
- The middle 10 bits 01 0110 1000 are the machine ID.
- The last 12 bits 0001 0100 0010 decode to 322, meaning this tweet is the 322'nd snowflake processed this millisecond.
Usage
[edit]The format was first announced by Twitter in June 2010.[1] Due to implementation challenges, they waited until later in the year to roll out the update.[6]
- X (formerly Twitter) uses snowflake IDs for tweets, direct messages, users, lists, and all other objects available over the API.[7]
- The 10-bit machine ID field can be further split into sub-fields by a given implementation. For example, the archived version of the original Twitter snowflake library in Scala splits it into a 5-bit data center ID and a 5-bit worker ID.[8]
- Discord also uses snowflakes, with their epoch set to 1420070400000, which translates to the zeroth second of the year 2015.[3]
- Instagram uses a modified version of the format, with 41 bits for a timestamp, 13 bits for a shard ID, and 10 bits for a sequence number.[9]
- Mastodon's modified format has 48 bits for a millisecond-level timestamp, as it uses the UNIX epoch. The remaining 16 bits are for sequence data.[10]
See also
[edit]References
[edit]- 1 2 King, Ryan (June 1, 2010). "Announcing Snowflake". blog.twitter.com. Twitter. Archived from the original on May 8, 2021. Retrieved January 18, 2021.
- 1 2 "twitter-archive/snowflake at b3f6a3c6ca". GitHub. October 1, 2012. Archived from the original on June 22, 2021. Retrieved January 18, 2021.
- 1 2 "API Reference". Discord Developer Portal. Discord. Archived from the original on August 31, 2022. Retrieved January 18, 2021.
- ↑ @Wikipedia (February 10, 2025). "Wikipedia is a free encyclopedia written and maintained by a community of nearly 260,000 volunteers" (Tweet) – via X (formerly Twitter).
- ↑ "2019-08-03: TweetedAt: Finding Tweet Timestamps for Pre and Post Snowflake Tweet IDs". 2019-08-03. Archived from the original on June 17, 2022. Retrieved July 1, 2022.
- ↑ Siegler, MG (October 12, 2010). "Tweet IDs About To Get Jumbled In A Blizzard As Snowflake Is Set To Roll Live". TechCrunch. Archived from the original on October 19, 2022. Retrieved January 18, 2021.
- ↑ "Twitter IDs". Twitter Developer. Twitter. Archived from the original on September 1, 2022. Retrieved January 20, 2021.
- ↑ Source Code twitter-archive/snowflake, Twitter, August 14, 2010, archived from the original on December 31, 2025, retrieved May 24, 2025
- ↑ "Sharding & IDs at Instagram". Instagram Engineering. May 2, 2016. Archived from the original on January 12, 2021. Retrieved January 18, 2021.
- ↑ Source Code mastodon/mastodon, Mastodon, November 11, 2022, archived from the original on November 11, 2022, retrieved November 11, 2022