I see some ppl wanting Markdown on Mastodon and I'm like: do we need that on a micro-blogging platform?
Plus it would be a nightmare to correctly count characters length with it. Is `_foo_` the same length as `foo` or not?
If not then formatting limits you in your toots and I feel like it's not very useful.
My 2cts ¯\(ツ)/¯
@nev Exactly! I guess that the 500chars limit is very tempting, but like, no we don't need MD. And I didn't even mention the nightmare to craft an UI that's resillient to that as well >_>
@Eramdam like, look how many people screw up markdown on reddit. do we want that here. i mean—i-i don't have a reddit account…
@Eramdam there is a reddit bot that literally goes round and corrects everyone who forgets to escape the underscores in their ¯\_(ツ)_/¯'s
@nev haha. tbf I almost never comment on Reddit but I totally get why such a thing exists. Markdown is good once you know it but it's not very intuitive. And we're not even dealing with the subtle implementation differences!
@Eramdam someone will eventually write that markdown to toot translator, but dear goddess, we don't need it now!
@Eramdam should just allow markdown attachments like it allows photo attachments
@Eramdam let them implement a client with markdown. that's the beauty of an open protocol
@Eramdam you can take the subtle (and possibly existing only in my head) semantic differences between /this/, *this*, and _this_ out of my clawed arthritic hands
@Eramdam adding complexity like that increases the burden on anyone creating mastodon clients, all for the sake of a bit of bold or whatever. Doesn't feel worth it at all considering it'll make posts uglier.
@Eramdam I would vote for plain text, because it's easier to type on mobile
@Eramdam I feel that once you need Markdown you need to get, you know, an actual blog. those things we used to have