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.
If youvwant that you’d be using public key cryptography and having the user hold a private key
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?