Mastodon: markdown support in toots

[Aethylred]

Basic markdown formatting in toots would be nice, you know;

• bullet points

1. numbered lists

_italic_
bold
~strikethrough~

!Z͙A̮̥̳̹͉̙L͕̝̦̭̹ͅGO̭̲̩̘͝!̭̩̲͚̀ ̶̰̲̳H̭͔́e̗̯̪̲͔̫̗͘ ̰̩̯̲̰̘̩c̣̺̬o͏̣̞m̤͟e̹͈͇͉̺s͔͕̙!͏!

[wboykinm]

I'd settle for text formatting - no need to stress the [links]() or ![images]() yet.

[valentin2105]

Codes with "```" would be awesome too.

[DeadSuperHero]

In my experience, I'm not sure it's worth it. Don't get me wrong, Markdown is great for long-form content - blogging, articles, and social networking do benefit from it. However, for anything featuring a stream, there is a downside.

Formatting typically requires a lot of extra characters. For a platform with a 500-char limit for every toot, that can be a problem, as it negatively affects character count. Unfortunately, removing the limit doesn't exactly resolve the problem, as you end up with content that is extremely long-form cluttering up the stream. From a microblogging standpoint, this actually goes against how microblogging is currently being used, and can make the whole thing unwieldy.

You could add a visual filter that just shows part of a post and collapses the rest, but that can make content look ugly really quickly.

[ThomasLeister]

Hmm, at first I wanted so have Markdown support, too, but I can understand @DeadSuperHero s point and yes ... he's right I guess. Might not be worth it. And additional text formatting will probably disturb the uniform look of the timeline... People will actually make use of BOLD BIG LETTERS ;-)

[diomed]

👍 yes, this has to happen!
```
code
````
markdown formatting as well!

[Spunkie]

I just want to 2nd @diomed & @valentin2105 here, inline code,

code blocks,

and quote blocks would be of daily use to me.

From the conversations I've had with maintainers of other large open source projects(like chocolatey) the piecemeal approach to implementing markdown will only lead to headaches down the line though. Either support markdown in its entirety or not at all.

If you are going to implement markdown it would be wise to offload the work to a library that is already CommonMark compliant. Most large services seem to be moving towards it commonmark, even github's own spec is based off it now.

[zcdunn]

I would like to see full markdown support. Code blocks in posts would be great! I think general user consensus and moderation will keep users from abusing it.

[msappir]

I think adding markdown or any other rich-text/formatting options, beyond perhaps italics, would have a significant negative impact on the experience of reading feeds. Having so many different things in front of you at the same time (multiple feeds, full of multiple toots, with avatars, icons, controls) is already visually taxing, making it "messier" might make it overwhelming.

[Fastidious]

I am for minimal GitHub flavoured Markdown (bold, italics, code, and links).

[krainboltgreene]

Moving to #853

[rkingett]

I can't tell, has full markdown support been added yet? I'd love to see markdown support.