this post was submitted on 10 Apr 2025
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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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[–] [email protected] 13 points 2 days ago (1 children)

That post and this provides zero info

[–] [email protected] 2 points 6 hours ago

Latest variant is NSFL

[–] [email protected] 13 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago) (3 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 5 hours ago

@Ulrich Yeah, but then you'll have normies complain like where are the DMs? where are the DMs?

Just like it was on Mastodon where DMs were actually a thing, but were not something so straightforward (usually just create a regular post with only the person that you wanted to talk with tagged in there).

The enshitification is so damn real.

@mesamunefire

[–] [email protected] 10 points 2 days ago (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago) (1 children)

I don't want to give out any more personal info than I have to

You don't have to.

  1. You can opt out of giving any information whatsoever, just no one will be able to DM you
  2. 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.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 2 days ago (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 2 days 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)

[–] [email protected] 5 points 2 days 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.

[–] [email protected] 48 points 2 days ago (2 children)

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?

[–] [email protected] 44 points 2 days ago (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 18 points 2 days ago (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 20 points 2 days 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.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 2 days ago

It could be photoshopped.

[–] [email protected] 28 points 2 days ago (2 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 33 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago) (2 children)

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)

[–] [email protected] 13 points 2 days ago

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

[–] [email protected] 3 points 2 days ago (1 children)

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

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 days ago
[–] [email protected] 13 points 2 days 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).

[–] [email protected] 24 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago) (1 children)

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".

[–] [email protected] 8 points 2 days ago

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

[–] [email protected] 17 points 2 days ago (1 children)

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

[–] [email protected] 4 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago) (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 2 days ago

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

[–] [email protected] 12 points 2 days ago

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

[–] [email protected] 13 points 2 days ago

oh jfc

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