this post was submitted on 07 Apr 2025
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Nicole [LOCKED]
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Due to recent developments, we've had to lock down this community until further notice. For more information, please take a look at this post: https://feddit.org/post/10515288
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I still haven’t gotten Nicoled. Still unsettling. Did we find a correlation between getting nicoled yet
Edit: ok seems like some soft ideas of connections. Maybe room for more exploration.
I can at least confirm that I don’t go to Furry Lemmy (YET always room for improvement I suppose) and I have never been Nicole’d.
Maybe she knows I have a girlfriend
Someone suggested it was a way to collect data on users. The filenames for the pictures are all different, and the only reason for that is tracking, just like they do with web beacons on web pages or spam email.
You generate a list of users and each one gets a unique filename. When someone contacts the server asking for that file, you can connect that user's anonymous online Identity with real-world data - date and time they were online, what ISP and area you connected from, your browser, operating system, etc. Combine that online fingerprint with that from data brokers, and you can track back to the person's real-world identity.
Rather unlikely, at least for the majority of images sent. They are hosted on regular lemmy instances (the ones I got are on lemmings.world, lemmy.doesnotexist.club and lemmy.net.au), so unless the spammer has access to the server logs of those instances, they can't use them for tracking.
What's notable though is that the instance the photos are hosted on never match the sender's instance, at least for me. So they probably upload them on one instance and copy the link into their spam script.
We're still unsure how users get chosen, sadly.
Can't be instance-specific. I'm the only active user on my personal instance and I still occasionally get some.
I mean, same with me, there are two active users on mine 😅
I guess we need a survey for all users here including nicoles instance, username, the users instance and username and how often and when they were nicole'd. Most other things can be pulled via API (how active they are, when they are active, comment/post languages, etc.)
I get nicoled about 1x every week
I thought someone had worked out that it was users who commented on NSFW furry posts that got these. I guess I could do a test and see if I get my first one.
It definitely seems to be when I post, but I've never posted on furry content that I'm aware of lol
I got some and never interacted with anything furry.
I just got my first one after commenting on c/harrypotter. Is that considered "furry" nowadays ? I mean, I guess Hagrid IS pretty hairy... ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
I've had people take my jokes seriously plenty of times, but never before has it been every respondent.
Nah, I don't think so, I'm not a furry fan at all, but I still got these messages, three times.