(cringe) This is what I'd call technologically illiterate journalism. It's not quite as bad as complaining about the name of the project (insert crying baby gif), but it's not far elevated above that level.

https://medium.com/dark-mountain/fatal-flaw-with-mastodon-1ef0cb1965ed

He mentions that the system is distributed, but obviously hasn't grokked what that actually means.

Servers have user accounts. I know, shocking, isn't it? Same applies for email, xmpp, forums and just about any other service located on a server. They're not all magically synchronized by some universally agreed protocol. Nor would it be reasonable for them to be.

If you want a pre-internet analogy, there could be Bob living in Manchester and Bob living in Glasgow, and they might be different Bobs!

Scandalized? I thought you would be.
@bob I think this is a legitimate criticism. It is, of course, by design and I happen to agree with the design. However, if you see that this service is being compared to Twitter and not email, what else is a person who may not be technically savvy supposed to think? I also agree that it poses a problem for "mainstream" users. Instead of 1 URL to see what a famous person is posting, you now have to know the server that person is on. Was "therealdonald" on .xyz or .cloud?