@rastilin it wasn't "made up", it was an – obviously embarrassing! – mistake related to naming of the account in question.

I am not defending them making that mistake, that was silly and they should have checked. But the mistake did not substantially change the facts.

I'm not sure I agree. This is the kind of mistake that's only really possible if the person writing the article doesn't understand what they're writing about and doesn't really bother to check. I don't think anyone who was informed about Mastodon would have made that confusion, and naming "John Mastodon" as founder is wild, because literally a single second of Googling would have cleared it up. Also, "named after himself", again, a single second of googling would have shown this was false. There are multiple points where "facts" come out of nowhere it's not just one single confusion.

I also note that the article is now substantially different, the word "founder" doesn't appear anywhere for example.

@compfu

> I never second-guessed that name and just thought they invented a founder because they couldn't wrap their head around a non-venture capital-backed social network.

Well, I will say my assumption here has always been that the reason why it was more likely for someone to make that kind of mistake in this context was precisely because of that inability to wrap one's head around such an idea…