Private (14):

• Austin Country Club
• Burl Oaks Golf Club
• Cloquet Country Club
• Medina Golf & Country Club
• The Minikahda Club
• Moorhead Country Club
• Oak Ridge Country Club
• Owatonna Country Club
• Ridgeview Country Club
• Somerset Country Club
• Spring Hill Golf Club
• St. Cloud Country Club
• Wayzata Country Club
• Woodhill Country Club

Public (98):

• Albany Golf Club
• Alexandria Golf Club
• Atikwa Golf CLub at Arrowwood Resort
• Balmoral Golf Course
• Bemidji Town & Country Club
• Benson Golf Club
• Blueberry Pines Golf Club
• The Bridges
• Cedar River Golf Course
• Cedar Valley Golf Course
• Chisago Lakes Golf Course
• Coffee Mill Golf Course
• Cragun’s Legacy – Lehman 18
• Crosswoods Golf Course
• Crow River Golf Club
• Cuyuna Rolling Hills
• Daytona Golf Club
• Detroit Country Club
• Dodge Country Club
• Eagle Creek Golf Club
• Falcon Ridge Golf Course
• Forest Hills Golf Course
• Fountain Valley Golf Club
• Glencoe Country Club
• Golden Eagle Golf Club
• Grand View Lodge – The Pines
• Great Life Golf & Fitness
• Green Haven Golf Course
• Green Lea Golf Course
• Hawley Golf & Country Club
• Headwaters Golf Club
• Hidden Haven Golf Club
• Interlaken Golf Club
• Kimball Golf Club
• Koronis Hills Golf Club
• Lake City Golf
• Lake Miltona Golf Club
• Lake Pepin Golf Course
• Litchfield Golf Club
• Little Crow Country Club
• Little Falls Country Club
• Long Bow Golf Club
• Long Prairie Country Club
• Lynx National Golf Course
• Madden’s Pine Beach East
• Madden’s Pine Beach West
• Marshall Golf Club
• Meadow Greens Golf Course
• Meadows Golf Course
• Minnesota National Golf Course
• Monticello Country Club
• New Ulm Country Club
• Northern Hills Golf Club
• Northwood Hills Golf Course
• Oak Summit Golf Course
• Oakcrest Golf Course
• Oakdale Golf Club
• Oneka Ridge Golf Course
• Ortonville Municipal Golf Course
• Pebble Lake Golf Course
• Perham Lakeside Golf Club
• Pheasant Acres Golf Club
• Pine Island Golf Course
• Pomme de Terre Golf Club
• The Ponds Golf Course
• Princeton Golf Course
• Redwood Falls Golf Club
• Rich Spring Golf Club
• River Crest Public Golf Course
• River Oaks Golf Course
• Rivers Bend
• Riverwood National Golf Course
• Rose Lake Golf Club
• Ruttger’s Bay Lake – Jack’s 18
• Shadowbrooke Golf Course
• Shoreland Country Club
• Southbrook Golf Club
• Spring Brook Golf Course
• Sundance Golf Club
• Territory Golf Club
• Thief River Golf Club
• Thumper Pond Golf Course
• Tianna Country Club
• Tipsinah Mounds Golf Course
• Tyler Golf Club
• Valley Golf Course
• Valley High Golf Club
• Viking Meadows Golf Club
• Village Green Golf Club
• The Vintage at Staples
• Wapicada Golf Club
• Warroad Estates Golf Course
• Waseca Lakeside Club – played 6/8/23
• Wedgewood Cove Golf Club
• Whispering Pines Golf Course
• Whitefish Golf Club
• Whitetail Run Golf Course
• Willow Creek Golf Course
• Zumbrota Golf Club

We were already playing in 2021 – hurry up and get warm, Minnesota…

Note: Not 100% sure of the accuracy of this list – might have played some, might be missing a few.

Last month I wrote about the Mastodon tech stack and today I’ll talk about the business of Mastodon: finance, marketing, legal and operations. I’m by no means an expert on any of this, but trying hard to keep in front of a news cycle that seems to get accelerated by the actions of Twitter daily. There is a lot out there to read and digest, so let’s get started.

Background

Mastodon was created by German software developer Eugen Rochko and was first released in October 2016. Five years later, Rochko incorporated Mastodon gGmbH as a German non-profit with him serving as founder and CEO. The Mastodon code is free and open-source software (FOSS) and anyone can download the software from Github and use it to run their own social media site.

There are lots of good introductory Mastodon posts, including the one by Glenn Fleishman that I linked to last month. I won’t go into the specifics of things like the fediverse and the ActivityPub protocol, but people seem to be most interested in Mastodon as a Twitter replacement. The Electronic Frontier Foundation (@eff@mastodon.social) has also published a nice series of posts.

As of today, the instances.social website has current stats on 18,196 instances, the largest of which is run by Mastodon gGmbH (mastodon.social). That is where I currently have my account, along with almost a million others (who have posted more than 53 million times). The Mastodon Users bot shows total Mastodon accounts recently surpassing the ten million mark (hard to tell how many active Twitter users post-Elon, but they had roughly 400 million last year).

Finance

With no ads and an aversion to commercial posts, many Mastodon instances are run by hobbyist volunteers. The time and resources to run a larger instance are not free, however, so groups often turn to crowdfunding sites like Patreon and Open Collective to help facilitate monthly or annual financial support. Mastodon.social, for example, has seven levels on Patreon for individuals ($1/month, $8, $10, $20, $40, $200) and three levels for corporate sponsorship ($100/month, $200, $500). The Patreon side currently has 9,667 patrons, raising $33,147 per month.

While all of the software components of Mastodon are free, the expenses associated with running a small instance include server, bandwidth and storage costs (plus time to learn, troubleshoot and administer your instance). There are also a growing number of service providers that offer managed Mastodon hosting for a monthly fee, some for under $10/month. The main Mastodon documentation has much more information about running your own instance here.

Marketing

Mastodon has a reputation for being hard to join, but there are many efforts to make it easier. The user base is growing, but still relatively small in the traditional social media sense. My personal experience so far has reflected both the technical focus and the smaller universe: I followed 395 various accounts on Twitter and currently follow 150 mostly technical people on Mastodon.

I never used the Twitter website and the same goes for Mastodon. I’ve been a huge fan of third party Twitter clients and was very happy to see many of those same companies jump on Mastodon client development last year. My personal favorite is Tapbots, a two-person Texas company that created the excellent Tweetbot for Twitter and now sells Ivory for Mastodon. Having (synching) clients on both iOS and macOS is key to my enjoyment of these platforms and the Tapbots crew is now taking steps to make joining Mastodon easier for everyone.

When I think about who is using Mastodon now, who should be using it and what the overall demographics look like, it reminds me of my old business school marketing classes. My Gen Z daughters don’t currently use it, very few of the non-tech communities I was a part of on Twitter use it and as I mentioned earlier, brands and other commercial users really don’t use it (and haven’t exactly been welcomed). It will be interesting to see if this platform grows to provide these other user groups with enough value to join and participate. I’d love to see more reporters, musicians, athletes, venues, artists, chefs, restaurants, government agencies and public safety organizations on Mastodon.

Corporate and brand accounts are interesting. I think there was always value in voluntarily following brands on Twitter, but I’m not sure how businesses should approach this. I’ve read some people say businesses should run their own instances and assign accounts like they assign email addresses, but I’m not convinced that is the right approach. I’m also curious to see how people use domain names for this purpose – do you use a subdomain of your brand (mastodon.7minutemiles.com) or register something new (7minutemiles.social)?

Legal

Given all of the recent uncertainty with Section 230 and the Supreme Court, it’s a wonder anyone wants to start up any social media instance these days. The threat of lawsuits is real and the legal landscape of Mastodon includes things like the rights and responsibilities of users and admins, requests from copyright holders and law enforcement, backup, recovery and security responsibilities and moderation of content. Some of these may not be critical roadblocks for small instances, but for larger organizations, it might be harder to justify the risk of entering this space.

Moderation of online content has always been a major issue. In order to be listed on the server page at joinmastodon.org, you must abide by the Mastodon Server Covenant, which has four requirements:

• Active moderation against racism, sexism, homophobia and transphobia
• Daily backups
• At least one other person with emergency access to the server infrastructure
• Commitment to give users at least 3 months of advance warning in case of shutting down

The EFF mentioned the Santa Clara Principles on their “don’t screw it up” post, which offers way more guidance on moderation than I ever thought possible. Someone mentioned that Mastodon is like Twitter with HOAs, as every instance administrator sets forth their moderation policies (the “house rules”) and has the ability to ban users and block access to other instances. It remains to be seen whether or not Mastodon admins abuse this power or offer better transparency, due process and accountability than the traditional social media platforms. While you can move your account from one instance to another, it’s not really an easy or complete solution right now.

Operations

In addition to all of the moderation issues mentioned above, the day-to-day operation of a Mastodon instance requires all of the skills of a traditional website: performance tuning, scaling, maintenance, backup and monitoring. Even the large, well-managed instances have been hit with outages and DDoS attacks and the security of the core Mastodon codebase is still somewhat suspect (but like all open source projects, can be reviewed and generally patched quickly).

It’s interesting to see staffing levels on even the largest instances in the Mastodon world (and how this compares to Twitter and the other platforms). There seems to be little redundancy in roles and there are many things that can go wrong (and indeed there have been some recent high profile instances that have shut down). While community support for admins exists, I haven’t seen much outside the managed hosting world in terms of formal support contracts. As user counts grow, however, I’m sure we’ll see more options develop in this space.

Summary

Personally, I love what Mastodon is becoming and how it’s filling the void left by the unfortunate direction Twitter has taken under Elon Musk. If I could make a living running an instance or helping advise others on the Mastodon universe, that would be exciting. Perhaps I will start out with a small, personal instance for our family. Or perhaps I will just try and get more friends to try it out with existing instances. But if it’s good enough for formal Apple support, hopefully Mastodon will continue to grow and be around for a long, long time…

Today the Pioneer Press published Shooter’s column, which contained the following:

— Jeff Sorenson, the teaching pro at Minikahda Country Club, won his 157th golf tournament the other day, the Calloway Pebble Beach ProAm.

Jeff is a great guy, winning the Tapemark in 2009. But so far, I can find no proof of this tournament win online. Assuming this is a different event from the famous Pebble Beach tournament, but I would love to know what really happened.

Anyone?

Winter parking in Linden Hills is…challenging 🍕

Our new kitchen counter display (design by the lassie CK)

When I first added my concerts page back in 2020, I looked for a third-party video hosting option to process, store and stream my videos to this site. I didn’t really like all of the ads and other junk that YouTube added, so I signed up for a free basic tier Vimeo account. After quickly running into their daily upload limits, I upgraded to a plus tier plan. That annual renewal is now almost up and I’ve decided I don’t want to renew. Unfortunately, they don’t really allow you to downgrade gracefully back to the Basic tier, so I decided to take another look at YouTube.

While it appears that YouTube still has many of the issues I didn’t like before, it does seem that I can add all of my Vimeo videos to a newly created @7minutemiles channel at no cost (“be sure to hit the like and subscribe buttons”). Tonight I ran into an upload limit of ten videos, so I’ll see if that goes away after I finish an ID verification process they offered or if ten is just going to be the daily limit. I decided 720p versions of these concert videos shot on various iPhones is fine and the quality so far seems to be good. It also looks like I can go back and set custom thumbnails like Vimeo, so that’s nice. It was weird that YouTube seems to be much more concerned about checking for copyright, but every video I’ve uploaded so far that it flagged said the owner allows the content to be used on YouTube.

The last part of my research will be to look at custom WordPress plugins that enhance the default handling of embedded YouTube videos. That was one thing I liked about having a Vimeo shortcode for WordPress, as it allowed me to set the initial player width to 850 pixels. Plugins like this one seem to allow that, plus a lot of other things I probably don’t want or need. Mostly concerned with mobile scalability, but some of the video SEO might be nice too, as I don’t think many people really saw my videos on vimeo.com (or my hard to find concerts page). EVERYTHING seems to be on YouTube, and now I guess I will be as well…

UPDATE (3/19/2023): My ID has been verified with Google and I can now use “advanced YouTube features,” which removes (or at least vastly increases) the daily upload limit. All of my former Vimeo concert videos are now on the new @7minutemiles YouTube channel. Join MK and SK and subscribe today!