Posting "Followers Only" to protect posts from scraping?... somewhat?
Google scrapes all public posts on Fediverse.
Yes I was shocked to hear that until someone said and showed me (I'm encouraging you to search or dox yourself by searching).
All users... from Mastodon's developers... Admin's of instances... User's everywhere... have responsibility... and if truly the 'alternative' they will not let commercialism take over and simply harvest here *unchallenged / unsaid*.
So maybe this will help Mastodon not be scraped onto Search by choosing "Followers only" to filter who it goes to (for some posts, or you decide which types of posts at whatever status...)
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🔽 EXTRA ABOUT #MASTODON /
+ #FEDIVERSE COMMERCIALISATION
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Mastodon's developer @Gargron told me (years back) that it's not for him to "tell" or even recommend people not to use Google / Youtube links... (we have #indvidious for example which be honest is much better now then when I asked him)... but any who not ACTIVE IN BEING AGAINST / WON'T PUT A SIGN on their instances etc so not working against this and even helping if it's so clear they are scraping commercially from non-commercial Fediverse, Mastodon, Lemmy, Friendica, etc...
So then we should anyway do something ourselves in posting more consciously and bio description to say "no"...
"NO CONSENT TO COMMERCIAL SCRAPING" or choose whatever words as cover your back more CLEARLY / legally / etc.
Overall it would help if everyone did it or made it clear which side they are against on the:
software level
instance level....
user level...
➿ #Mastodon 
👀 💻 ⬅️ ➡️ 💻 
🔎 
➿
@freeschool but posting followers only does not actually prevent or protect against scraping. The way this platform is designed, it's only a suggestion, that content is still subject to scraping
And people need to realize that when they post here.
@volkris Hmm good you said. So it limits the scraping if it's respected you mean (how is it only a 'suggestion')
And how about "Circle", what's the difference in that? Thanks
@freeschool when you post followers only it attaches a notation to your content that says followers only, but any recipient is perfectly free to ignore that notation.
So it's really a suggestion, you're suggesting that this post only go to your followers, but any recipient is perfectly free to vacuum that content up into a database or do anything else they want to with the post.
Followers only is only a suggestion, only a notation tacked onto your post. It's up to the recipient, including whatever corporation, to decide whether or not they want to respect it.
@Hyolobrika yes, the server or instance.
It's all up to them to decide what to do with the content they receive from each other.
@Hyolobrika Well it would be about servers you trust. It's up to the server as to which people see the content.
But from quickly re-skimming the protocol spec, I'm not even sure how true that is. It looks like the protocol still allows servers to send content to other servers regardless of what a user requests.
No human-made protocol can stop it.