Your point about the possibility of unevenly sized text and line breaks mucking up the whole layout makes sense. I wasn’t thinking about that. I think a better-than-nothing solution would include the stripping out of markdown formatting that alters the rendering in, image references (I’m new here, are images even allowed in post body content?), and converting the markdown URLs as you mentioned.

Another thing that could influence what people put in there would be some example text in maybe some helpful guidelines alongside the post form.

Looks like at least I’ve got a few more reasons to finally sit down and pick up a little Rust.

Man, this might even motivate me to stop putting it off and just jump on the train.

Absolutely, yes. It’s hard for me to see federating with corporations such as Facebook Meta much differently than doing so with an instance run by spammers.