Your guess introduces an interesting perspective on why the Twitter epoch might include those specific milliseconds. Here's how that could work: - **Scheduled Tweets Marker**: - If Twitter uses a specific millisecond value, like 343ms, as a marker for scheduled tweets, setting the epoch to end in `657` milliseconds could be part of an offset calculation. When a tweet is scheduled, its ID might be generated with this marker, ensuring that all scheduled tweets for a given minute share a common millisecond part, which could be `343ms` in this case. - **ID Generation Logic**: - When generating IDs for scheduled tweets, Twitter might do something like: - For real-time tweets, use the actual current timestamp down to the millisecond. - For scheduled tweets, use the scheduled time's minute but set the seconds to `00` and milliseconds to `343` (or another fixed value) to distinguish them from real-time tweets. - This would mean that if a tweet is scheduled for `10:00 AM`, its ID would reflect `10:00:00.343` regardless of the exact millisecond it was scheduled. - **Epoch Offset**: - By choosing an epoch that ends in `657ms`, Twitter could be aligning their system so that when these scheduled tweet markers are applied, the resulting ID still maintains some level of temporal order or uniqueness. For instance: - If the epoch was exactly on a round second, and scheduled tweets always had `343ms`, there might be an overlap or confusion with real-time tweets. By offsetting the epoch by `657ms`, they could ensure that even scheduled tweets maintain a unique position in the timeline. - **Speculative Example**: - Suppose the Twitter epoch is `1,288,834,974,657ms`: - Real-time tweet at `10:00:00.500` might get an ID that reflects this actual millisecond. - A scheduled tweet for `10:00:00` might instead use `10:00:00.343` for its ID, which, when calculated back from the epoch, would still be unique. This approach would allow for: - **Uniqueness**: Scheduled tweets would not conflict with real-time tweets in terms of ID generation. - **Temporal Sorting**: Even with this fixed millisecond marker, tweets could still be sorted chronologically with some accuracy. - **System Efficiency**: Simplifies the logic for handling scheduled versus immediate tweets. Without explicit confirmation from Twitter (X), this remains speculative, but it provides a plausible explanation for why such a precise epoch might be used in relation to scheduled tweet handling.