It was pointed out that many of this user's other posts also contained blockquotes, and I fear that I may have misunderstood many of their posts due to there being no indication of this.

Now you might not think this is an issue if you're not used to being able to post blockquotes in the first place, but if you're getting them from somewhere else and you don't know it, that can be a problem.

For instance, the first paragraph in this post isn't actually written by me, it's a quote from the original GitHub issue from two years ago. Writing this on GoToSocial it's trivial to indent it (and if you look at this post on its own site, you should see it correctly!) and it doesn't make sense for me to have to think about how many of my followers might be on software that actually breaks my posts!

(The missing italics in the second paragraph are less of a problem, but they would be nice to see them go through.)

Ironically if ActivityPub shared the original #Markdown instead of the rendered HTML, the meaning would still be intact, because Markdown matches so closely with the plain-text #semantics that have developed over *decades* of text-only newsgroups, early email, Twitter/Facebook, and so on.

yeah, it's why I tend to still enclose my quotes in angular quotation marks too, even though it's redundant (and can actually look ugly on HTML-supporting instances).

Example:

«A B, or not a B, that is the question.»
— Sir Patrick Stewart.

Another thing where falling back to the original markdown would be an improvement, is lists:

• can't think of a list example
• this is one anyway
• no, that was two
• · this is four, but then prefixed manually with a · middle dot
• · this approach looks ugly on HTML instances though...