I gotta give it to you guys. The foresight to prevent a disaster is 10/10. Top tier. Well done.
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to be honest, this should have been done way earlier.
Still glad you're doing it now!
It's pretty obvious ...
What's scary is how many people just accepted that some woman wanted to randomly spam thousands of pictures with her smoking weed.
Yeah it seemed funny at first but the longer this went on the creepier it got as we all realized this isn't just a catfish.
Whoever is doing this to the actual person in the photos is a terrible human being and should go climb under a rock for the rest of their lives.
I can't wait for the future 4 hour video deep dive into Nicole history and lore.
Is this Nicole thing really still a thing? Thatβs so like back when I still had a 401k.
So was it last week or the day before yesterday? It all happens so fast, I can't - and frankly - refuse to catch up.
This is a copy+paste of a comment I left on the [email protected] mod post after the recent incident with the gruesome picture(s?):
βI think if Lemmy doesnβt have the infrastructure to defend against attacks like these which are presumptively conducted by one bad actor, then it doesnβt have the infrastructure to defend against wealthy organizations when our communities do get big enough to be noticed by them.
[[email protected]]βs history underscores how the messaging system in particular needs a massive overhaul; using image recognition as a filter for messages like Lemmy.World does for image posts (with options for NSFW that isnβt NSFL?), preventing images (and URLs? or only allowing white-listed sites?) from being sent within the first message sent between users (unless a box is ticked?), ~~not showing message recipients images until they are directly opened~~, and preventing the de-anonymizing of message recipients should be made first priority for the next patch.β
Edit: not sure if my comment is inciting other trolls/spammers to target me but I just got this DM several hours after commenting
Dont render images in private message (#3043)
https://join-lemmy.org/news/2025-04-08_-_Lemmy_Release_v0.19.11
Ah very cool. A recent update too. Thanks.
Yes. As you can see, a few large instances like lemm.ee, lemmy.ca and others have already updated: https://fedidb.org/software/lemmy?version=0.19.11
Hopefully others will follow soon
Honestly I think the easiest thing would be to not allow images or embedding at all in PMs and perhaps display a warning message when clicking links "you are leaving [instance name]..."
Analyzing potentially lots of text and images in an effort to "guarantee" safety of users is likely a sisyphusian endeavour that is bound to fail - and furthermore also has privacy issues (namely that "private" messages aren't private at all)
Wait, there are people who genuinely believe she's the one behind it?
I thought it was pretty obvious that she's the target of harassment. Some people must be new to the Internet
Yeah, I've been targeted by enough romance spam that I just assume any photo of a woman I don't know was probably stolen from some random Tumblr or Instagram.
Thank you for your work managing the spam waves!
About damn time. The joke has run it's course a long time a ago and if these posts are victimizing an individual they most definitely need to be stopped.
Considering the spammer has used so many different photos, and they all seem to be "in the moment" webcam photos, I suspect they may have webcam spyware on the victim's computer
She looks to me like a college student attending an online class. Looks like it's shot on a laptop's built-in camera, lighting is whatever, she's dressed casually and comfortably, facial expression is neutral or even bored...
If you're taking a college class via Zoom, can you see your classmates' webcams?
with the content i've seen it gave me more of an impression of being captures of a live stream, but that's just guessing
Is this the person some folks around here were referring to as the "Fediverse chick?"
Thanks. Even if it isn't a harassment campaign I'm sick of the messaging
I always thought it was weird how much attention people were paying to span messages. Giving them that much attention only serves whatever purpose they have.
We donβt get many on this platform. Itβs the only spam Iβve received here. So getting spam we all shared is something that generates discussion. I donβt think anyone took it seriously. It was mildly humorous at first, but now that knowledge is spreading that this likely isnβt some generic spammer we can deal with it differently.
What of the recent NSFW/gore images that were shared? Has that been reported to authorities?
Not expecting police to solve it, but at least it would be on their radar.
we looked into it, we currently believe that to be a copycat not related to the other pms.
the lemmy.world account involved in that was most certainly compromised from an unrelated data breach and all connections originated from IPs linked to an anonymization service, so there's also not much to follow up on.
we will reconsider this if it happens again.
This annoys the fuck out of me and I hope whoever is behind it doesn't realize their goals, because I don't want lemmy to degrade into a bunch of spam PMs.
part of a larger scale harassment campaign against the person depicted
Oh boy that's horrible, if true I hope she has reported it to police, and they can help her.
Damn, I never thought about it this way. Wow. I always took it as a funny thing not thinking of the person in the photo being an actual person who could very well be harassed. Thank you for bringing this to light. Whoever thought of this is a good human being. <3
Yay, fediverse lore!
Would rather more positive lore, but I guess it is fediverse lore. Just checked from curiosity, all but 2 messages I have got are from Nicole bots, 1 was another spammer and the other an automated "welcome to this community" bot message.
Sorry if this isn't the right place to ask, but are you able to confirm whether admins have reported this to the police?
Even if violence hasn't been perpetrated, the harassment is still a crime surely.
I don't know if others have, I only know that we (Lemmy.World, Fedihosting Foundation) have not reported it to the police.
I don't have high hopes that the police would be able to do anything about this. For the harassment against the person shown in the images, that would likely have to be reported by them directly for the police to take that up.
For random online spam, as in harassment of fediverse users receiving the PMs, that seems like it would be an extremely low priority for police. It's also likely fairly difficult to impossible to follow up on, considering that the person sending the PMs most likely used a VPN to access these accounts.
I have no context for this and thought it was an April fools joke left up but no, this is a real problem here?
I've heard that if you actually add her on friendica, the mayor of Toronto shows up at your house and gives you an old fashioned.