Finally Mastodon will show incoming text formatting (with today's release) and the rest of us can stop wondering how garbled our posts are going to be on Mastodon and we can just post as we intended. Mastodon people still can't write rich text though. Baby steps.

It's not true though that Mastodon used to strip all formatting from posts. They were just very selective about what formatting they preserved:

• paragraph breaks were preserved
• hyperlinks were preserved
• some inline images were preserved

What tended to be messed up on Mastodon:

• lists
• context provided by emphasis