> which I think is what _really_ drove a lot of the adoption
That GitHub used it as a "native" format everywhere from the beginning (as far as I remember), probably helped Markdown become at least as popular (or maybe even more) as GitHub itself.
Then everyone and their mother started doing static blogs, and since people already wrote their READMEs and issue comments with Markdown, I guess it was natural to want to write your blogposts with Markdown too, just like Gruber.
As for Teams, it looks like it’s much closer to Markdown (uses the same idiosyncratic/stupid link syntax), but still significantly incompatible even if they call it that. And my guess (as a non-user) is that it’s just an input method immediately converted to HTML or similar, not retained as text. So in that way it’s not Markdown either.
I get bold and italic confused because Google Chat is almost-Markdown except for * being bold and _ being italic (whereas it's double vs singular in classic Markdown).
My company is on Teams and I regularly use Markdown in my messages, though I still struggle to remember that I have to use underscores not asterisks for italics.
It is funny to occasionally see it explained like 'on Reddit you can use ...' and think '..dude, markdown, just tell them you can use markdown' (and then realise oh right yeah ok, your way is probably clearer to them and you probably don't know it as 'markdown' either).
Reddit's Markdown flavor is a bit weird though. It got closer to CommonMark with New Reddit, but the rest of the UI got worse, and people using Old Reddit don't get the formatting the new version supports, so things like code blocks are often broken.
I can’t provide usage numbers, but it used to be the happy path for using GitHub Pages. I suppose static site generation was fairly niche so “popular” may not be the right word. I think Jekyll was a big fish in a little pond, however.
That GitHub used it as a "native" format everywhere from the beginning (as far as I remember), probably helped Markdown become at least as popular (or maybe even more) as GitHub itself.
Then everyone and their mother started doing static blogs, and since people already wrote their READMEs and issue comments with Markdown, I guess it was natural to want to write your blogposts with Markdown too, just like Gruber.