(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 That was a strange post. Why is it so hard to grasp that your handle is the only one in your instance but in the federation you have your handle + instance as your ID?