It's the other way round: I don't know if it applies to this fella, but /we/ used ** // and __ long before applications knew what that's supposed to mean. We've been using it even on devices that are _physically_ incapable of producing formatted text, so it was the readers responsibility to parse and understand what it's supposed to mean. Back in those days we'd also type :'-( instead of 😢.

It actually annoys me that markdown got it all wrong, and thus applications using markdown do it all wrong as well:

*foo* should be bold, not italic
/foo/ should be italic, not just /slashes/
_foo_ should be underlined, but for lemmy that's just another way of saying italic, underlining seems to be outright impossible.

Why? :'-(