cross-posted from: https://kbin.social/m/RedditMigration/t/233339
Comments from the original poster:
Not much else needs to be said tbh. Fuck Spez. // Edit: Not sure why imgur marked the album as NSFW, but there’s nothing NSFW in it other than the name of one of the mods including the word “removed”
Personal comment: the critter isn’t even dead but the vultures are already flying in circles around it. I certainly do not envy their situation, I bet that the users will treat them like shit.
They could just go with UUIDs. Assuming all servers choose actually random UUIDs, the probability of a collision is astronomically low. Even if a server tries to maliciously “claim” UUIDs, that server could be defederated from, and the number of UUIDs it’d be able to eat is similarly tiny in comparison.
Yeah, I mean the goal would be to link the IDs across all instances. Rather than having different numbers and running a calculation into a table that links the IDs, you could just have a table, or better yet just have the same ID.
The issue probably lies in creation of new IDs. Different instances may have to be allocated a block of IDs, so that they can create new IDs without conflicting with any other instance.
The idea behind UUIDs is that there are so many (128 bits) that you don’t need to worry about allocating blocks or anything. Each post gets a random UUID, that’s its ID, and it’s propagated along with the post so other instances can reuse that UUID.
If each instance can have a unique prefix then there’s zero chance of collision.
XXXXXXXX-XXXX-XXXX-XXXX-XXXXXXXXXXXX
If those first 8 are the prefix that’s room for over 4.2 billion unique instances, which is more than half the population of the whole planet. Do you think there’ll be that many?
If youvwant that you’d be using public key cryptography and having the user hold a private key