Djot is great. I use it in my project ( client for https://timbran.org/moor.html ). It has all that I needed from markdown without any excess, and it's safe and easy to parse and familiar to people.

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childintime 21 hours ago | parent [-]

Without the excess? From the site:

> Straight double quotes (") and single quotes (') are parsed as curly quotes

I don't know who actually likes curly quotes, they are clearly excess to me. And as parsing sometimes fails (as the site says it may), you get inconsistent results, and failures stick out like a sore thumb.

Here is another syntax: this is <*bold>. Very unlikely to clash, can be vibe coded in an hour. But it's more of the same.

	▲	chrismorgan 20 hours ago \| parent [-]
		> I don't know who actually likes curly quotes For reading, I don’t know who prefers straight quotes. For writing— There are more than a few people on HN who deliberately type curly quotes and other non-ASCII punctuation, due to a strong preference for them. I’m one of them. I use Compose sequences: ; ; for left single quote, : : for left double, ' ' for right single, " " for right double. (Accordingly, I hate being subjected to automatic curlification, partly because it’s not always correct, but more because if I typed ' or " you better believe I meant ' or ".)