I want to request the Footnote plugin to be reenabled for richer content creation in the Purism community forums. For details, see its thread on Discourse Meta.
It would help with a guide I am writing up about regarding a Citizen Lab report, as I can start referencing relevant links towards various topics and concepts. If given a choice between only one method of displaying them, I would choose inline over non-inline.
Example code:
This would have to be performed by a Purism sysadmin as it requires direct server/container access to update the .yml. The Purism sysadmin team currently has many higher-priority tasks on their plate; I can add this as a nice-to-have issue, but please don’t expect immediate action.
In the meantime, maybe some kind of Markdown pre-processing will do the trick - as anything that really needs a mass of footnotes is probably something that you would prepare offline anyway and then paste in when you are ready.
The only software I use that has Markdown support is Discourse; I have the guide as a draft due to this reason. However, sometimes I have to create new threads and transfer the guide to Tuta (previously Tutanota) instead, where it resides as a draft there too, albeit without Markdown support; it is exposed as raw code intead.
Oh, I meant something quick and dirty using e.g. awk 
If it were me, I would format it offline using whatever tools you like and then host it on one of your many servers and then just a post a link here. So you wouldn’t need to use markdown at all.
If nothing else, maybe LibreOffice has enough functionality to create the document, then export as PDF, then host a PDF file. (LibreOffice can also produce HTML but that may or may not meet your requirements. If using HTML from LibreOffice, I would strip the changelog before publishing.)
Ideally, you can have footnotes come up “on hover” (if using a mouse).
However if the footnote is only a link then none of this really applies - as links are easy to do without using footnotes.