It is a little odd, come to think of it, that aside from Mathstodon.xyz's TeX plugin, Mastodon doesn't have an obvious way to mark up italics or bold text-- in the previous post I did that with Unicode "mathematical bold" character codes, which is not how you'd usually do it in HTML. You can do italic that way too but it's kind of a hack.

I guess a lot of messaging and microblogging platforms don't have this, but it seems to me as if bold and italic should be treated almost as punctuation, part of the expressiveness of text.