Seed Hypermedia includes a built-in commenting system that allows anyone to add annotations, discussions, and feedback to documents. Comments are cryptographically signed and can be threaded for conversations.

Comments are separate signed blobs that reference a specific document version. Key properties:

Use the Comments service to create comments via gRPC:

grpcurl -plaintext -d '{
  "target_account": "z6Mk...",
  "target_path": "/my-document",
  "target_version": "bafy2bz...",
  "content": [
    {
      "block": {
        "id": "comment-block-1",
        "type": "Paragraph",
        "text": "Great explanation! One thing to add..."
      }
    }
  ],
  "signing_key_name": "my-key"
}' localhost:55002 com.seed.documents.v3alpha.Comments/CreateComment

Retrieve all comments for a document:

grpcurl -plaintext -d '{
  "target_account": "z6Mk...",
  "target_path": "/my-document"
}' localhost:55002 com.seed.documents.v3alpha.Comments/ListComments

To reply to an existing comment, include the reply_parent field with the parent comment's ID:

grpcurl -plaintext -d '{
  "target_account": "z6Mk...",
  "target_path": "/my-document",
  "target_version": "bafy2bz...",
  "reply_parent": "z6Mk.../z6FGG...",
  "content": [...],
  "signing_key_name": "my-key"
}' localhost:55002 com.seed.documents.v3alpha.Comments/CreateComment

Anyone can create comments on any document, but having a capability makes your comments propagate with the content. The optional capability field in CreateCommentRequest allows trusted commenters to have their comments automatically distributed.

The Comments service provides additional operations:

Comments enable several collaboration patterns: