@Cyborgneticz ah I found it yeah, that could theoretically be indexing all the public pages an instance provides, including people's profiles and the toots/threads shown there.

In this case posting followers-only would certainly prevent that from being included, as they'll only ever show up for logged in users that follow you.

Mastodon has a quite hidden "Opt-out of search engine indexing" setting under Preferences > Other, which *might* be respected by the Google data scraper at least. Instance admins can also set an instance-wide default for this

@f0x I've used that setting on the indexing thing

good to know the details though cause D: why the internet people gotta be garbage

@f0x @Cyborgneticz if this still doesn't work, simply storm Google headquarters while alternately screaming "hiQ" and "trespass to chattels" until the problem resolves?