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I’ve always liked instagrams id_generator() for sortable bigints without an external point of failure.

me too - and I Base64 encode it to make it human readable

not sure I understand the base 64 encoding:

a bigint generated with this: 2457081803026990508

base64 encoded: MjQ1NzA4MTgwMzAyNjk5MDUwOA==

why?

Sounds like they mean they're just hashid'ing the bigint id, likely stored in a separate slug column with the output

the bigint is just 64 bits so I b64 encode the binary representation which is about half the size.