Just a heads up to those who host. Piefed has been doing some work to keep the sanity of their admins. I’m thinking of removing dms from my instances just because of all this.
That post and this provides zero info
Latest variant is NSFL
I’m strongly in favor of removing DMs on all platforms and asking users to add direct contact info to their user profiles. Email, chat apps, whatever.
It’s been fairly obvious that there were additional spam mitigations needed in the Fediverse, and especially Lemmy. I mean what’s to prevent a bad actor from spinning up thousands of accounts on various servers and using them to manipulate votes and spam messages?
I’m afraid if anyone decided to do that that ActivityPub is inherently flawed in such a way that there would be no way to prevent it.
Nicole is, in a way, doing the Fediverse a favor.
Fuck that; I don’t want to give out any more personal info than I have to. Lemmy just needs to implement a functional spam filter.
Remove PMs, and comment threads will just be clogged with people having one on one conversations. There’s gotta be a better way.
I don’t want to give out any more personal info than I have to
You don’t have to.
- You can opt out of giving any information whatsoever, just no one will be able to DM you
- You can create a profile on chat platforms to be paired with your online profile.
comment threads will just be clogged with people having one on one conversations.
I don’t see that happening, personally. Like we could be having this convo 1-1 right now but we aren’t.
But I want to be able to PM, and I don’t want to have to use a 3rd party service that not every Lemmy user will use to be able to do so.
I agree with you (and also somewhat with the other people, too)
I want to keep some accounts completely separate from my other accounts, and also don’t want to set up a whole other set of accounts to keep them separate
E.g., on Reddit I would keep certain conversations on reddit only (but used a 3rd party app mostly so I never saw the chats, just dm/pms)
Yeah if someone needs to reach me via mastodon/lemmy/etc…they can take their time to use other platforms. DMs without any spam detection is a recipe for disaster. As is the case for any messaging in the last 30 years.
Man…I got annoyed at the Nicole stuff. But I always figured whoever it was, it wasn’t her. I figured she was just some adult webcam “actress” that doesn’t even know Lemmy exists. And someone was using her image to do this.
Now she’s dead? How do we confirm this? Do we call the Toronto police? What would we even tell them?
We don’t know if it’s actually her in the image. While the likeness is similar, it’s not 1:1 and the injuries make it even harder to tell.
Police, sure, but it probably needs to come from instance admins who will have all of the information on the bots sending the image.
Oh wow. I already didnt get the “joke” with her(?) spamming. It seemed a little sleazy to me making fun of her in any way. But now with gore pictures? Disgusting.
Hopefully its just fake and the person is in good health. If there is a possibility of the pictures beeing real, I would recommend contacting the locals authorities too.
It’s probably photoshop or a photo of someone who looks like her. Horrid stuff, sure, but don’t let it make you lose sleep for it. “Hopefully not real” - it may well be. There’s an unlimited supply of gore on the Internet. I found the hard way back in my teen years. Something died inside of me because of it (innocence? I dunno…), and then I decided that the best thing I could do is accept that people suck and to try to live my own life as best as I could, and help others as much as I could.
It could be photoshopped.
That’s pretty rough. I hope Lemmy webclient and app developers will make some changes to the way images are handled in DMs based on these events. Just don’t load images in DMs until you click a button or something.
They already did, in 0.19.11
https://join-lemmy.org/news/2025-04-08_-_Lemmy_Release_v0.19.11
Dont render images in private message (#3043)
Thanks for the headsup. That makes my notification icon feel a lot less risky to click 😅
Though it’s client-specific and nobody uses lemmy-ui
I do
Tesseract did that a couple releases ago. All images in DMs are disabled by default and you have to hit a switch to show them (like how email clients work when you have images disabled.). Not sure if others have done similar, but that feature was a direct result of this (before it took a dark turn).
I first learned about “Nicole” when I received this message through the contact form on PeerTube.wtf
https://peertube.wtf/c/beyorkisan/videos
The person would setup live streams on PeerTube, showing the same clip on a loop, of the supposedly “Nicole”.
I recognise the name Beyorkisan. Is that from the Nicole spam Matrix?
This is why I never check my DMs. 99% of the time they’re just used to harass and threaten people.
Would threatening with a good time be counted as a threat or harassment? 🤔
edit: this was a joke unrelated to the topic at hand. I see how this could be construed as not taking the “Nicole” DMs seriously, so I apologise.
Go to your local precinct and threaten the officers with a good time and let us know how they react.
oh jfc
i hope this is all some sick game… what a weird ride
Weirdly grateful right now that lemmy image embeds don’t work properly on mbin (they fall back to being ordinary URLs) 🫠
deleted by creator
Thus begins the Nicpocalypse, the last stage of inquisitional censorship before botspam ascends into a state of divine memedom. In doing so, Nicole joins the first progenitor of the Dark Meme pantheon in his eternal dance across the interwebs, a handmaiden to his horrid everpresent jiggle…
We’re watching history unfold. I kinda wish we weren’t…
EDIT: You do realize that every downvote makes the Dark Lord dance harder, don’t you?