this post was submitted on 13 Jan 2025
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154
By the way, you can have Markdown in Lemmy post titles (lemmy.world)
submitted 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago) by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
55 comments fedilink hide all child comments
 

EDIT: on web, it renders like this

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[–] [email protected] 51 points 2 months ago (5 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 2 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.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 2 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

[–] [email protected] 8 points 2 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.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 2 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.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 2 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)

[–] [email protected] 3 points 2 months ago

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

[–] [email protected] 3 points 2 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.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 months ago (2 children)

Do you know a way to see the ActivityPub JSON for fediverse objects?

[–] [email protected] 6 points 2 months ago

you can use https://browser.pub I like it very much for that use case :)

[–] [email protected] 4 points 2 months ago (1 children)

Yes - it's easy to do from a command line. For this post, it would be:

curl --header 'accept: application/activity+json' --location https://lemmy.world/post/24241974 | jq .

it looks like

{  
  "@context": [  
    "https://join-lemmy.org/context.json",  
    "https://www.w3.org/ns/activitystreams"  
  ],  
  "type": "Page",  
  "id": "https://lemmy.world/post/24241974",  
  "attributedTo": "https://lemmy.world/u/amon",  
  "to": [  
    "https://lemmy.world/c/fediverse",  
    "https://www.w3.org/ns/activitystreams#Public"  
  ],  
  "name": "By the way, you can have `Markdown` in Lemmy post titles",  
  "cc": [],  
  "mediaType": "text/html",  
  "attachment": [],  
  "commentsEnabled": true,  
  "sensitive": false,  
  "published": "2025-01-13T20:48:50.824942Z",  
  "language": {  
    "identifier": "en",  
    "name": "English"  
  },  
  "audience": "https://lemmy.world/c/fediverse"  
}

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[–] [email protected] 17 points 2 months ago (6 children)

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

[–] [email protected] 7 points 2 months ago (1 children)

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

[–] [email protected] 5 points 2 months ago

i am not human

[–] [email protected] 6 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago)

Nor Boost. It does in Raccoon, though.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 2 months ago (1 children)

or in Jerboa

[–] [email protected] 14 points 2 months ago (2 children)

Works in Voyager!

[–] [email protected] 4 points 2 months ago

Not for me

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[–] [email protected] 3 points 2 months ago

Or Thunder

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 months ago

Renders fine in Sync

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[–] [email protected] 16 points 2 months ago (2 children)

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

[–] [email protected] 3 points 2 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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[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 months ago

Sync for lemmy works

[–] [email protected] 10 points 2 months ago

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

[–] [email protected] 9 points 2 months ago

You can also edit them after the fact unlike other platforms

[–] [email protected] 7 points 2 months ago (1 children)

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

[–] [email protected] 4 points 2 months ago (1 children)

ABSOLUTELY NOTHIN

[–] [email protected] 3 points 2 months ago

Good god, ya'll.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 2 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.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago) (1 children)

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

[–] [email protected] 5 points 2 months ago (1 children)

Can you create headings in headings?

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[–] [email protected] 7 points 2 months ago (1 children)

Oh no

[–] [email protected] 4 points 2 months ago

Oh no indeed

[–] [email protected] 6 points 2 months ago (2 children)

Lol apparently you can't

[–] [email protected] 12 points 2 months ago (1 children)

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

[–] [email protected] 4 points 2 months ago

Works for me on Sync.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 2 months ago (1 children)

What client do you use?

[–] [email protected] 3 points 2 months ago (2 children)

Jerboa. Its awful but there's nothing better

[–] [email protected] 3 points 2 months ago (1 children)

Voyager

[–] [email protected] 2 points 2 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.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 2 months ago

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

[–] [email protected] 2 points 2 months ago

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

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago) (1 children)

Thunder, Eternity, Connect, Summit?

https://www.lemmyapps.com/

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 months ago (2 children)

I'll try eternity, thanks. None of the others are on fdroid

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[–] [email protected] 6 points 2 months ago

@[email protected] Doesn't render it on Mbin

[–] [email protected] 4 points 2 months ago

Wow, amazing

[–] [email protected] 3 points 2 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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