At least for Twitter there are proxies that work without JS. For Mastodon, none that I'm aware of. I usually just audibly sigh and remark that they shall "keep their secrets then", and move on.
What I do not understand is someone going through all this work of putting an AI-scraper tarpit on Mastodon, a system that fundamentally needs to have its data distributed to other servers. It's just signalling and posturing, because that content is available on any server that has someone following the account.
(Tip to AI scrapers: if you want to slurp all the data from the fediverse, just create an account on mastodon.social and pull the data from the "Federated timeline" stream.)
It's not you. It's the people that were somehow convinced that serving crap is gonna "hurt" the models. These are people who have 0 clue on how models are trained and how they work, but have been riled up by others who similarly don't understand the technical details, but have strong biases against them. This is ignorance signalling at its finest.
And, as expected, it's hurting their (regular) users more than they'll hurt the model trainers. Oh well..
All the talk about "putting the human first" and "embracing diversity" goes out of the window the moment you are not diverse in the way they want.
If you’re in rush to airport or hospital and you are delayed by protesters for a cause you don’t understand, it’s one thing, I could understand a bit of cursing. However, this is someone’s web resource, they are free to do with it whatever they want, and they owe you and me nothing.
The problem is that not only their methods "aren't perfect", but completely ineffective.
If you are posting on a public social network, your data will be available to the public, one way or another. The whole protest becomes a "performance art" kind of thing: it might be useful for creating awareness, but in most cases the people who will be seeing it are the ones who are aware of it in the first place.
> people who will be seeing it are the ones who are aware of it in the first place
People are not aware of everything all the time, we forget quickly.