Exciting! Mastodon may soon see support for incoming rich text.

Which means that more formatting options will be seen in Mastodon.

https://github.com/mastodon/mastodon/pull/23913

See screenshot for what this might look like.

@fediversenews

Add support for incoming rich text by ClearlyClaire · Pull Request #23913 · mastodon/mastodon

Add native support for the incoming tags: del, pre, blockquote, code, b, strong, u, i, em, ul, ol, li Transform h1 through h6 tags to <p><strong>contents</strong></p>

GitHub
@atomicpoet @fediversenews
markdown is useful, but I've noticed that wherever it is on by default, people will use a single asterisk for a footnote, or for multiplication, or for some non-Markdown reason, and then the next 3 paragraphs of their comment will be in italics, and they'll be confused and upset. Complaints result, until markdown gets removed. To survive, markdown must be off by default, and require a button press to turn it on for a particular toot.

@llewelly @atomicpoet @fediversenews

Or integrate some proper WYSIWYG editors in the apps with the way to escape asterisk and other characters. Now, this is probably more daunting and surreal than making people more informed in the ways of Markdown.