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F.A.Q.

F.A.Q. - Privacy

  • I **DO** want my Mastodon/Fediverse account to show up in these search results, what should I do? - You have these following options:
    • Make sure none of following words in the "Bio" of your account: nosearch, #nosearch, noindex, #noindex
    • Go to your user Profile and make sure "Suggest account to others" is checked. This will show your account in your Mastodon instances public directory.
  • I don't want my Mastodon/Fediverse account to show up in these search results, what should I do? - You have these following options:
    • Place one of the following words in the "Bio" of your account: nosearch, #nosearch, noindex, #noindex
    • Go to your user Profile and uncheck "Suggest account to others". This will hide your account from your Mastodon instances public directory.
  • I run a Mastodon instance but don't want any of my user accounts to show up in these search results, what should I do? - You have these following options:
    • We use the public profile directory to find publicly listed users, you can disable that directory by unchecking the "Enable profile directory" box in your server settings.
    • Use the robots.txt file to tell bots/scrapers to not scrape your API. You can omit all scrapers with * or specifically block ours using the current user agent ws-bot-v1.
  • How long does it take for my information to be removed from this search site? - We will have a daily process that updates this site automatically, so when that is fully running, it should take about 24 to 48 hours to remove your information. Until then, anyone who DM's a request to the account listed in our Contact Information will have their information manually removed as quickly as we can manage.
  • Do you intend to create a site that provides timeline or post search? - No, our only goal is to make it easier for Fediverse users to find other users to follow, while trying to preserve the privacy of those users.

F.A.Q. - Scraping

We are now scraping on a regular interval and our user agent is ws-bot-v1. You can use this user agent to stop us from scraping your website with a robots.txt file. See this robots.txt wikipedia article for details. We've tried to be as considerate as possible and part of that is letting you know who we are as well as minimizing the impact on the instances we are scraping.

Legal

A full DMCA takedown policy is in the works, in the meantime, if you need to submit a takedown request, please use our Contact Information to reach us.

Other

All western.social sites are subject to various US state and federal laws as well as to service providers acceptable use policies. Our policies are being drafted, if you have any concerns or anything to report to us, please use our Contact Information to reach us.

Contact

If you have any questions or would like to get ahold of us, you have the following options: