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Nicole has taken a dark turn (feddit.org)

submitted 2 months ago by mesamunefire@lemmy.world to c/fediverse@lemmy.world

29 comments fedilink hide all child comments

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.

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[-] Lost_My_Mind@lemmy.world 46 points 2 months ago

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?

[-] AmbiguousProps@lemmy.today 43 points 2 months ago

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.

[-] Actionschnils@feddit.org 17 points 2 months ago

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.

[-] elbarto777@lemmy.world 20 points 2 months ago

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.

[-] elbarto777@lemmy.world 7 points 2 months ago

It could be photoshopped.

[-] Gibibit@lemmy.world 24 points 2 months ago

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.

[-] Die4Ever@retrolemmy.com 30 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago)

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)

[-] Gibibit@lemmy.world 10 points 2 months ago

Thanks for the headsup. That makes my notification icon feel a lot less risky to click 😅

[-] Mubelotix@jlai.lu 2 points 2 months ago

Though it's client-specific and nobody uses lemmy-ui

[-] Draconic_NEO@lemmy.world 2 points 2 months ago

Vast majority of people do, it is the default UI when you use a browser, and by far it is the most fast and lightweight one. For most people accessing on a web browser Lemmy-UI IS Lemmy. Obviously many people use alternative UIs and Apps but the point is a change in the default UI that people use is a majorly impactful change.

[-] Blaze@lemmy.dbzer0.com 2 points 2 months ago

I do

[-] ptz@dubvee.org 10 points 2 months ago

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).

[-] meldrik@lemmy.wtf 23 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago)

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".

[-] Coelacanth@feddit.nu 9 points 2 months ago

I recognise the name Beyorkisan. Is that from the Nicole spam Matrix?

[-] metaldream@sopuli.xyz 16 points 2 months ago

This is why I never check my DMs. 99% of the time they're just used to harass and threaten people.

[-] donuts@lemmy.world 5 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago)

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.

[-] foggy@lemmy.world 1 points 2 months ago

Go to your local precinct and threaten the officers with a good time and let us know how they react.

[-] ocean@lemmy.selfhostcat.com 11 points 2 months ago

That post and this provides zero info

[-] Kraiden@kbin.earth 2 points 2 months ago

Latest variant is NSFL

[-] thisbenzingring@lemmy.sdf.org 11 points 2 months ago

oh jfc

i hope this is all some sick game... what a weird ride

[-] Ulrich@feddit.org 10 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago)

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.

[-] Psythik@lemm.ee 10 points 2 months ago

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.

[-] Ulrich@feddit.org 3 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago)

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.

[-] Psythik@lemm.ee 5 points 2 months ago

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.

[-] tpyo@lemmy.world 3 points 2 months ago

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)

[-] mesamunefire@lemmy.world 3 points 2 months ago

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.

[-] MHLoppy@fedia.io 10 points 2 months ago

Weirdly grateful right now that lemmy image embeds don't work properly on mbin (they fall back to being ordinary URLs) 🫠

[-] Draconic_NEO@lemmy.world 4 points 2 months ago

And this is why it is especially important that instances upgrade to 0.19.11 ASAP since that version both offers DM removal when banning users with content removal, and also hides images from being rendered in DMs. Unfortunately a vast majority of instances are on 0.19.9 or earlier.