Which other web services support Markdown formatting and also single line breaks? Reddit, for example, didn’t…
Since AFAIK the main reason for this choice in standard Markdown was to make the raw .md files more readable, I can see how this isn’t necessary in Lemmy. I still see two reasons not to change this though:
Effort: forking and maintaining a markdown rendering library just for lemmy would take a ton of effort for a pretty small usability improvement. The dev team is already small and overloaded with work, this doesn’t seem like a good use of their time.
Consistency: each website having its own flavor of Markdown syntax would be pretty chaotic for users. Right now you can learn basic Markdown once and use it on Reddit, Lemmy, Github, etc. If every website did it their own way you’d have to remember all the little differences, it would get messy.