You can, but maybe you shouldn't. Given that this post is in the fediverse community, I don't feel too bad about mentioning that Lemmy is part of a federated network with PieFed and MBIN (I try not to bollock on too much about the platform I happen to be using).

In the ActivityPub JSON for this post, there is no indication that this field contains MarkDown. If anything, it says the opposite, it says it contains HTML. It's therefore not unreasonable for other platforms to render it as such.

Given this, and the poor support for mobile clients indicated in the comments, and the fact that it's only a subset of MarkDown tags, but include ones that aren't part of CommonMark standard, I'd argue that it's not necessarily a good idea.

[–] flamingos@feddit.uk 24 points 11 months ago (1 children)

In the ActivityPub JSON for this post, there is no indication that this field contains MarkDown. If anything, it says the opposite, it says it contains HTML. It’s therefore not unreasonable for other platforms to render it as such.

Actually, the name property is explicitly plain text, it shouldn't contain any type of markup, whether that be markdown or HTML.

[–] andrew_s@piefed.social 7 points 11 months ago (1 children)

Oh, wow. Thanks.

For clarity, I wasn't intending to say that PieFed treats that field as HTML (it treats it as text), I just meant that if you were looking at that JSON, and being a bit lazy like me and not looking at specs, then it wouldn't be unreasonable to assume that the 'mediaType' field also refers to 'name' (rather than a 'content' field which this post doesn't happen to have).

Anyway, this seems to be even more reason why MD shouldn't be put in titles, and front-ends shouldn't be encouraging the practise by rendering it.

[–] kat@orbi.camp 3 points 11 months ago

Eh, I'll probably use italics tho, just like I did * in reddit.

[–] p03locke@lemmy.dbzer0.com 6 points 11 months ago

Also, this gives me real text-on-image-in-Facebook-post-just-to-get-noticed vibes.

If everybody can use Markdown in their post titles, then everybody will use Markdown in their post titles, until it's a mess of colors, bold, and italics.

[–] fmstrat@lemmy.nowsci.com 4 points 11 months ago (1 children)

Markdown is plain text, so it's fine to go in the field. It's also fine for apps to allow OP's post to look like garbage because there's no requirement for support.

[–] andrew_s@piefed.social 2 points 11 months ago (1 children)

A comment here distinguishes between the 'plain text' that's allowed by the spec, and MarkDown as a markup language (it's confusingly named, I guess, but that's what Wikipedia categorises it as too)

[–] fmstrat@lemmy.nowsci.com 3 points 11 months ago

Oh yea, I just mean that all markdown characters are ASCII, and thus allowed in a plain text field. 😉

[–] AA5B@lemmy.world 4 points 11 months ago (1 children)

In the ActivityPub JSON for this post, there is no indication that this field contains MarkDown. …. it says it contains HTML

This seems like a bug. Regardless of what clients may support, the json ought to accurately describe fields

[–] andrew_s@piefed.social 9 points 11 months ago

Another commenter (who's contributed code to Lemmy) pointed to a link that provides the specification for that field: "A simple, human-readable, plain-text name for the object. HTML markup MUST NOT be included."

So in this case, it's more that the JSON looks a bit ambiguous: 'mediaType' is only referring to the format of the text in a post's body, but - unlike me - you'd also need to be aware of the spec to know that it doesn't apply to the title.

[–] nutomic@lemmy.ml 3 points 11 months ago

The Lemmy backend doesnt treat this field as markdown, if you look at the Activitypub data (curl -H "Accept: application/activity+json" https://lemmy.world/post/24241974 | jq) the title is federated as plaintext. Only lemmy-ui decides to render it as markdown for some reason.

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[–] vk6flab@lemmy.radio 17 points 11 months ago (6 children)

Word of caution, it doesn't render on Connect for Lemmy.

[–] catloaf@lemm.ee 6 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago)

Nor Boost. It does in Raccoon, though.

[–] amon@lemmy.world 6 points 11 months ago (1 children)

Hmm, but the best part about markdown is that it is human readable regardless so it should still be fine

[–] rickyrigatoni@lemm.ee 6 points 11 months ago

i am not human

[–] steventhedev@lemmy.world 5 points 11 months ago (1 children)

or in Jerboa

[–] borth@sh.itjust.works 14 points 11 months ago (2 children)

Works in Voyager!

[–] AceSLS@ani.social 4 points 11 months ago

Not for me

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[–] IronKrill@lemmy.ca 3 points 11 months ago

Or Thunder

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[–] driving_crooner@lemmy.eco.br 16 points 11 months ago (2 children)

If you have markdown on your title, then is not being rendered by Jerboa.

[–] f4f4f4f4f4f4f4f4@sopuli.xyz 3 points 11 months ago (1 children)

Do you also have the Android weirdness in which the tick marks appear to be in a different place? (Not Jerboa-specific)

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[–] AmidFuror@fedia.io 9 points 11 months ago

I'd settle for good spelling and grammar. Once most posters have mastered that, let them play with the formatting.

[–] bdonvr@thelemmy.club 9 points 11 months ago

You can also edit them after the fact unlike other platforms

[–] misk@sopuli.xyz 8 points 11 months ago (1 children)

What good is it for if I can’t change post title font to Comic Sans.

[–] motor_spirit@lemmy.world 4 points 11 months ago (1 children)

ABSOLUTELY NOTHIN

[–] rickyrigatoni@lemm.ee 3 points 11 months ago

Good god, ya'll.

[–] Feathercrown@lemmy.world 7 points 11 months ago (1 children)

Oh no

[–] amon@lemmy.world 4 points 11 months ago

Oh no indeed

[–] JohnnyEnzyme@lemm.ee 7 points 11 months ago (3 children)

(unlike Reddit, for example)

I use bold and italic a lot in post titles. Some of the other stuff wouldn't make much sense I don't think, but every little bit helps.

[–] amon@lemmy.world 8 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago) (2 children)

I mean, code could work and maybe ^superscript^ or ~subscript~ and that's about it I think

[–] infeeeee@lemm.ee 6 points 11 months ago (2 children)

Can you create headings in headings?

[–] smeg@feddit.uk 6 points 11 months ago (1 children)

You can, and it'll probably get annoying if everyone catches on!

[–] infeeeee@lemm.ee 6 points 11 months ago (1 children)

OK, I will never use it again.

[–] smeg@feddit.uk 3 points 11 months ago

~oh no~

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[–] smeg@feddit.uk 2 points 11 months ago (1 children)

Are sub and superscript officially supported by markdown now? Or is that a Lemmy-specific extension?

[–] infeeeee@lemm.ee 3 points 11 months ago

Lemmy-ui uses markdown-it: https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy-ui/blob/main/package.json#L65

Markdown-it follows the CommonMark spec with extensions: https://spec.commonmark.org/current/ As I see superscript is not part of the spec, but listed in the markdown-it readme as a plugin, so I guess it's coming from there: https://github.com/markdown-it/markdown-it?tab=readme-ov-file#syntax-extensions

They are also listed in package.json:

    "markdown-it-sub": "^2.0.0",
    "markdown-it-sup": "^2.0.0",

https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy-ui/blob/main/package.json#L73

Lemmy docs about markdown support: https://join-lemmy.org/docs/users/02-media.html#text

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[–] Fitik@fedia.io 6 points 11 months ago

@amon@lemmy.world Doesn't render it on Mbin

[–] clot27@lemm.ee 4 points 11 months ago

Wow, amazing

[–] jagged_circle@feddit.nl 4 points 11 months ago (2 children)

Lol apparently you can't

[–] targetx@programming.dev 12 points 11 months ago (1 children)

Guess it depends on your client because it works for me.

[–] GamingChairModel@lemmy.world 4 points 11 months ago

Works for me on Sync.

[–] amon@lemmy.world 2 points 11 months ago (1 children)

What client do you use?

[–] jagged_circle@feddit.nl 3 points 11 months ago (5 children)

Jerboa. Its awful but there's nothing better

[–] Jtee@lemmy.world 3 points 11 months ago (1 children)

Voyager

[–] JoshuaFalken@lemmy.world 2 points 11 months ago (2 children)

I still have installed a dozen or so clients, so I opened Voyager to remind myself what it is in comparison to Jerboa, which is also my preferred client.

Suddenly my android device has an iOS user interface. To me, this is lazy development. I'm sure it's fine for someone accustomed to it, but even having a static header and footer seem out of date.

I'll stick with Jerboa for the time being.

[–] jagged_circle@feddit.nl 3 points 11 months ago

It wasn't just the UI. There was something else broken about it since I last tried it.

[–] Jtee@lemmy.world 2 points 11 months ago

I'm pretty sure there's a preference to not be iPhone UI

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[–] perviouslyiner@lemmy.world 3 points 11 months ago

Be careful of the character limit on each viewer, as they can "trim" your title in the middle of some markup tag and just display part of it as the title.

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