Org mode is far more structured than markdown. Structured enough that so you can naturally store data in, and easily access/edit it later.

Whenever someone tries to do something similar in markdown, they have to invent an extension of markdown to do it.

Yes markdown is simply about formatting text. Org is a data format.

Markdown really isn't a specific thing with all the incompatible implementations, many of which allow embedding HTML (i.e. "whatever happens to be supported by current version of Chrome" is also part of those Markdown formats).

If you pick one of the more sane (or at least less insane) variants of Markdown, like Pandoc's variant, you do get at least some ways to embed data in reliable ways. It also makes it easy to export and style documents and write your own filters that can make use of the data in various ways. In general I prefer to use ORG-mode, but for some purposes I use Pandoc Markdown instead.

https://pandoc.org/demo/example33/8-pandocs-markdown.html

Because that would require leaving emacs, I guess.

Just a guess. I'm a Vim user so unlike emacs users I do know how to shower but like emacs users I can't manage to carry a conversation with someone in person. We only think partly alike.

> Because that would require leaving emacs, I guess.

Yeah, but if this kind of social network was hosted on Vim, nobody would be able to exit it I guess.

Frankly, you'd need to make vim even harder to exit if you want to compete with the big players in this space.

You could do the same thing with a Markdown file, but I wouldn't call it simpler than Org. Maybe by simple you meant "familiar to more people"?

I meant 'less markup' (in the sense of a simple ratio of markup characters over total characters). Now you can say that the markup is still fairly low and actually useful. But that goes to my second point of why not just use HTML. This is pretty much exactly what it's been designed for originally.

I think you can use whatever. The markdown is very org mode like.