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) software seeks to distinguish itself from Twitter through its orientation towards independently operated small communities. Thus it has a community-based, rather than top-down, moderation and service operation, based on cooperation without direct dependence. Like Twitter, Mastodon supports direct, private messages between users, but unlike "tweets" posted on Twitter, Mastodon’s "toots" can be either private to the user, private to the user's followers, public on a specific instance, or public across a network of instances. Mastodon servers run social networking software that is capable of communicating either via the OStatus protocol, or also the newer ActivityPub standard. A Mastodon user can