Mammoth construction of the Great Pyramid of ancient Egypt. The earliest known proboscideans, the clade that contains the elephants, existed about 55 million years ago around the Tethys Sea area. The closest relatives of the Proboscidea are the sirenians and the hyraxes. The family Elephantidae is known to have existed six million years ago in Africa, and includes the living elephants and the mammoths. Among many now extinct clades, the mastodon is only a distant relative of the mammoths, and part of the separate Mammutidae family, which diverged 25 million years before the mammoths evolved. The following cladogram shows the placement
Mastodon (software) therefore interact with users on any other server in the Fediverse that supports these. Mastodon approximates the microblogging user experience of Twitter, where users post short-form status messages for others to see. On Mastodon, these messages can include up to 500 text-based characters, an extension of Twitter's 280-character limit (originally 140), and posts are called "toots" instead of "tweets", as is the case on Twitter. Users join a specific Mastodon server, known as an "instance", rather than a single website or application. The instances are connected as nodes in a network, and each server can administrate its own rules, account