@Gargron you really have yourself to blame for this, both through initial naming choices and by appearing as “CEO of Mastodon” in Interviews and articles while only mentioning the distinction in passing (if at all), especially at a time when a lot of people have their first encounter with a network that isn’t owned or run by a single entity.

I would also prefer if “Mastodon” wasn’t a term overloaded with 3 different meanings but it certainly is that now and that’s going to be very hard if not impossible to undo, simply because how people use language.

And now claiming that Mastodon gGmbH and Mastodon (the software project) don’t benefit from the volunteer work of instance admins and fork maintainers is simply false.