There are a lot of potential pitfalls any time you accept text input from a user, store it, and regurgitate it back to display on a user’s browser. The thing is, HTML (and all HTML-encapsulated scripting languages) are just text. So regular words and a block of Javascript that makes dancing polka-dotted hippos dance across your screen and incessantly play the Hamster Dance song at 200% volume are, without protections, input and stored exactly the same way. Preventing ne’er-do-wells from doing injection attacks with SQL calls, HTML, control and escape characters, Javascript, etc. is part of a whole industry.

It appears lemmy does filter out raw HTML tags, at least. I tried to insert one in my last comment just for illustration and it was silently removed from the input.