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.