I usually generate N bits of randomness and base58 encode it. Choose N to your liking. You loose the benefits of monotonic sorting that is present in some UUID

I usually generate N bits of randomness and base58 encode it. Choose N to your liking. You loose the benefits of monotonic sorting that is present in some UUID versions. Base58 is url safe and does not contain any special characters. And you can still store values as binary (eg. bytea in Postgres instead of a text column).