mastodon.social is one of the many independent Mastodon servers you can use to participate in the fediverse.
The original server operated by the Mastodon gGmbH non-profit

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

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

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

@Gargron

@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.

@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.

@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.