Arnt Gulbrandsen wrote a new link parsing library called UTS58 that Mastodon just switched to. This huge undertaking was one of the main blockers to creating a truely #GloballyInclusiveFediverse! Mastodon historically used a library made and maintained by Twitter for all link-ification but when Twitter changed owners they abandoned their library and with it any direct route for Mastodon to support links and handles that it didn't support. Soon accounts like @north will display correctly.
Edited 10h ago