@nmoo I understand that you can include a limited set of HTML tags in your #ActivityPub posts that syndicate to Mastodon (@enkiv2 says the mastodon.py docs describe this but I don't see it in https://mastodonpy.readthedocs.io/en/stable/#writing-data-statuses) but apparently the #Markdown we're using here on #Qoto gets stripped out on Mastodon instances.
(Also, Qoto's Markdown implementation is massively broken.)