It’s weird how the markdown formatting bits (such as ### in a heading) appear in previews of posts. I don’t have time to research it right now, but I’m guessing that’s a known issue waiting to be fixed by someone.
Edit: Trying to add a screenshot to show what I’m talking about, but uploading images doesn’t seem to be working. I tried 2 clients and the mobile web.
For previewing the body text of posts, I’m not sure how one should otherwise display the text when confined to the list layout of feeds. For example, rendering the html generated from the markdown could lead to some irregularly sized preview text blocks, line breaks, font sizes, given the headings you mentioned would throw off the minimalism.
That said, I would like to see at least the markdown hyperlinks rendered inline with the body text preview, as the URLs often take the majority of the limited character count, and could be more compact as clickable links to enable more contextual text to be included in the summery. Then again, I’m not sure how embedded images using markdown could be rendered without yet again borking the structured layout of the aggregated feed. Raw text seems to have been a practical compromise that would be robust to gaming or clickbaiting in body text previews.
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.