I’m a fan of Mastodon, but one of the features that I’d really like has not made it into the mainstream release yet: Markdown support.

Sure, I can type any post in Markdown, and Markdown (by design) doesn’t look too bad even if not rendered as Markdown, but I like quotes to look like quotes, I like bold and italics, and so on.

There is a popular fork of Mastodon which supports Markdown, as well as numerous other things: glitch-soc.

I was a bit hesitant to make the change, but I decided what they heck, and gave it a try.

Installation was easy - well, easy if you’ve installed Mastodon before. If you have not, then the glitch-soc instructions are very much at the bare bones end of the spectrum.

My understanding is that, if I want to switch back to Mastodon, I just need to switch git back to Mastodon, and then install whatever the latest release is (accepting that I’d lose all the glitch-soc features).

It is an installation rather than a migration, in the sense that I didn’t need to migrate the database, but just do what is pretty much the same as a Mastodon update.

I am not 100% sure what to do about the lack of releases, and what that means in terms of security and upgrades. I think that I run an update at basically the same time as Mastodon issues a new release, but I still need to bottom this out.

But there we go: if you follow me in the fediverse, you’ll now see nicely-formatted toots.