“Rich text” is text that has formatting added to it like bold, italics etc. Ordinary Mastodon servers don’t let people create rich text posts, but they do display rich text posts.
If Mastodon doesn’t let you create rich text posts, how is it that I can see rich text posts from people in my timeline?
You can create rich text posts on certain non-Mastodon Fediverse servers and on servers running customised non-standard versions of Mastodon such as Glitch Mastodon ⧉. Because Mastodon is part of the wider Fediverse, its timelines also show posts from non-Mastodon servers.
There are also standard Mastodon servers that have been manually customised by their admins to allow rich text or other unusual text formats such as LaTeX ⧉ (an example of a server with LaTeX is mathstodon.xyz ⧉).
What kind of rich text can standard Mastodon display?
Standard Mastodon servers will display the following kinds of post formatting: bold, italics, strikethrough, ordered lists, unordered lists, blockquotes, inline code, fenced code blocks, headers. Headers are displayed as bold text in a separate paragraph.
What kinds of rich text can standard Mastodon create?
None. As mentioned above there is currently no support for creating rich text posts in standard Mastodon.
What kinds of rich text can Glitch Mastodon create?
The unofficial fork Glitch Mastodon ⧉ can display and create many kinds of rich text posts including headers, bold, italics, strikethrough, blockquotes, inline code, code blocks, subscript, superscript and lists. These can be written in Markdown or HTML, and there are more details of how it works here ⧉.
Where can I find a Glitch Mastodon server to join?
There’s a curated list of well-run reliable Glitch Mastodon servers in the Glitch section of fedi.garden ⧉. However, bear in mind they may not all have rich text activated, so ask their admins about it if you want more info.
Standard Mastodon supports showing rich text, so why doesn’t it support creating rich text?
It’s surprisingly difficult to locate the answer, as the topic has been discussed in various different threads on the official Mastodon Github, framed in slightly different ways so that the discussions aren’t always comparable. It seems to have just never been a priority for the developers, it wasn’t seen as crucial.
How do I ask the Mastodon developers to add rich text creation as a standard feature?
If you want standard Mastodon to support creating posts with text formatting, and if you’re comfortable using Github, the best way to let the developers know is probably to give a thumbs up in in this open issue ⧉.
What is rich text? What is Markdown?
Rich text means stuff like underlining, bold text, italics, strikethroughs etc, where ordinary text has additional formatting added to it. There is a popular open standard for creating and editing rich text called Markdown ⧉, but other standards exist too.
Does rich text cause accessibility issues for people using screen readers?
Properly formatted rich text is treated as normal text by screen readers, and works fine for accessibility.
Accessibility problems happen if people try to use obscure unusual characters as a substitute for properly formatted text. Unusual characters turn to gibberish when heard through screen readers ⧉, so it is best not to use them at all. Use rich text formatting instead, as properly formatted text is accessible.