Snowflakes

Snowflakes are the globally unique identifiers used throughout the Osmium protocol. They are represented as unsigned 64-bit integers and are safe to store as strings in clients that cannot represent every 64-bit value exactly.

Generic types

Fields annotate the entity a Snowflake identifies. Snowflake<Community> and Snowflake<User> have the same wire representation; the generic parameter documents the expected entity.

Format

On the wire, a Snowflake is a fixed64 or uint64 value. Keep it as an integer in languages with native 64-bit integer support, or serialize it as a decimal string at API boundaries.

Osmium Epoch

Osmium Snowflakes use 1735689600000 (2025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC) as their timestamp epoch. Add this value, in milliseconds, to the Snowflake timestamp component to get a Unix timestamp.