Standard markdown nor all of the flavors of markdown I know support this. However some do support inserting HTML directly, which is the way you'd usually go about it (but as you saw has its own issues).
It is possible the WriteAs forum has a custom version of markdown that supports it somehow, but I doubt it.
My guess is that WriteAs simply wont support what you are trying to do.
My website use markdown too. But this may changed with different implementations. I use typecho, a lightweight replacement of wordpress. It can identify and show the a tag containing the ref attribute as I pasted.
@skyblond @freemo
I have raised this on the WriteAs forum
https://discuss.write.as/t/mastodon-verification/2270
my point at the ends is asking more if this is a bug given that WriteAs uses Activity pub
@skyblond
Nothing sorry, I linked you earlier when the problem was still a bit of a mystery, figured you did something special. Now that we figured out it is stripping only Gargron could help potentially, or if someone out there knows a work around in general.
@zleap