The different connotations for birds and mastodons suggest that the platforms will reach entirely different user groups. If Musk doesn't push video and other technologies then Twitter has already reached its full potential market share. This leaves many opportunities to Mastodon. If the social climate gets colder, mastodons are better equipped than most birds. In a world of gene technology, extinction is only temporary.
Ok but Mastodons were not arctic/northern animals like Mammoths. They were a temperate (& subtropical? i think) climate creature.
Apart from their bones another piece of evidence of their existence is the way many of the plants in the eastern Nort American forest adapted to have spikes/thorns that seem ineffective against deer & moose etc but would be deadly against browsing with a trunk. Black locust is like this.
I would have loved to have met one.
Now, for silly analogies, I dunno, it's likely that the ancestors of today's native Americans hunted them to extinction. (They were probably delicious). Can someone build an analogy from that? :-)