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1. John Francis (johnefrancis@mastodon.social)'s status on Tuesday, 26-Sep-2023 23:43:31 JST John Francis

   Interesting, a high-interaction post I made yesterday has been already indexed by Google and produced a Google Alert notification within 6 hours.

   • Eugen Rochko (gargron@mastodon.social)'s status on Tuesday, 26-Sep-2023 23:43:26 JST Eugen Rochko

     in reply to

     • YurkshireLad

     @johnefrancis @YurkshireLad We don't sell anything. We do allow web crawlers. You have the option of opting out of search engine indexing in your settings.

   • John Francis (johnefrancis@mastodon.social)'s status on Tuesday, 26-Sep-2023 23:43:30 JST John Francis

     in reply to

     • Eugen Rochko
     • YurkshireLad

     @YurkshireLad @Gargron there was some grumbling months ago.

     Still, people's labour costs money, I'm happy to be listed as a sponsor, for now.

     But I don't want data to be sold into the advertising and marketing industry, even if it manages to be anonymized and GDPR-legal.

   • John Francis (johnefrancis@mastodon.social)'s status on Tuesday, 26-Sep-2023 23:43:31 JST John Francis

     in reply to

     Google has long been present on some instances with it's usual web crawling. I'm uncertain of the latest developments, but I think that mastodon.social both allows the crawlers, and might be selling a privileged view of instance data to Google or data brokers.

     I'm fine with crawling and indexing, but the sale of privileged data that helps the ad-hawkers will cause me to leave this instance eventually.

   • YurkshireLad (yurkshirelad@mastodon.social)'s status on Tuesday, 26-Sep-2023 23:43:31 JST YurkshireLad

     in reply to

     • Eugen Rochko

     @johnefrancis thanks for pointing this out. I had no idea. #mastodon

     @Gargron

   • John Francis (johnefrancis@mastodon.social)'s status on Tuesday, 26-Sep-2023 23:47:52 JST John Francis

     in reply to

     • Eugen Rochko
     • YurkshireLad

     @Gargron @YurkshireLad thanks for clarifying.

     Are there separate settings to opt out of commercial search engine indexing via web crawling, but opt-in to Mastodon's search indexing? I want the good people of Mastodon/Fediverse to find my content, but would rather not give it to Google etc.

   • Eugen Rochko (gargron@mastodon.social)'s status on Wednesday, 27-Sep-2023 00:33:05 JST Eugen Rochko

     in reply to

     • YurkshireLad

     @johnefrancis @YurkshireLad Yes