Discord Snowflake Parser

Ever wondered when a Discord server was created or how old a user account is? Because Discord generates IDs chronologically, you can mathematically prove the exact millisecond an account was made. This is useful for verifying account age ("veteran status") or checking for suspicious new accounts.

Discord uses a custom ID format called "Snowflakes". These are 64-bit integers that are unique across the entire platform. What makes them special is that they are time-ordered.

• Bits 63-22: Timestamp (milliseconds since Discord Epoch - the first second of 2015).
• Bits 21-17: Internal worker ID.
• Bits 16-12: Internal process ID.
• Bits 11-0: Inline increment (sequence number).

Distributed systems like Discord need to generate unique IDs across thousands of servers simultaneously without coordinating with a central database (which would be too slow). By using the current time as the primary component of the ID, servers can generate IDs independently that are guaranteed to be unique and roughly sorted by creation time. This technique was originally pioneered by Twitter.