This page describes comments on anything except wall posts.

This seemingly complicated mechanism instead of the regular inReplyTo is needed so that:

  • There's a single source of truth about comments
  • The object owner gets to enforce their privacy settings and blocks
  • The object owner gets to delete unwanted comments

Each comment is a Note which is part of a publicly-appendable collection as per FEP-400e. The collection depends on the type of the comment's parent object:

  • For photos, all comments on all photos in a given album reside in that album's collection, whose ID is specified as sm:comments in the album object
  • For board topics, the topic itself is the collection that contains its comments