This whole thing is like a mystery that gets more and more disturbing.
FediLore + Fedidrama
Rules
- Any drama must be posted as an observer, you cannot post drama that you are involved with.
- When posting screenshots of drama, you must obscure the identity of all the participants.
- The poster must have a credible post and comment history before submitting a piece of history. This is to avoid sock-puppetry and witch hunts.
The usual instance-wide rules also apply.
Chronicle the life and tale of the fediverse (+ matrix)
Largely a sublemmy about capturing drama, from fediverse spanning drama to just lemmy drama.
Includes lore like how a instance got it's name, how an instance got defederated, how an admin got doxxed, fedihistory etc
(New) This sub's intentions is to an archive/newspaper, as in preferably don't get into fights with each other or the ppl featured in the drama
Tags: fediverse news, lemmy news, lemmyverse
Partners:
This is gonna be the first Fediverse creepypasta
I was about to say that. We are slowly building up lore.
It's super creepy but a step up from beans nontheless.
!nicole@feddit.org is now mod only. Things seem to get nasty.
From sh.itjust.works I've been getting a "couldn't find community" on that one for at least several days.
Oh well, this turned dark very quickly. Let's hope it is not the girl itself.
Btw does this mean the spammer is not going to spam any further or will they now start sending such images now. If yes, it might be a good idea to disable image embedding in the code for PMs for the time being.
The accounts spamming the new image did not follow the typical pattern of previous spammers, at least in terms of origin instance. Instead of DMing from obscure small instances, this new spam came from 2-year old accounts from .world and .ml. This leads me to believe it is a second actor.
It is also not certain that the person in the most recent image is the same as "Nicole". To me it looked like a different person, but there was some damage so it's not possible to say for sure, at least for me.
So they most likely were set up beforehand, huh. I wonder what the motive behind this nicole spam even is.
The spammer is watching the threads here and is changing stuff accordingly. If we assume there are two spammers, the first one is doing it for attention? And the second one is now trying to scare us? To make people leave the Fediverse, perhaps? Interesting stuff. Though as OP said, the second one is most likely a troll. It just doesn't feel that "serious".
Unfortunately a consequence of the Nicole sub being locked down is we won't be able to track a very important detail: will the spam continue as before, change or stop? That would tell us a lot about whether it is one or multiple actors.
The most plausible explanation to me is some edgy user who had unused accounts left over on .world and .ml since the API exodus found a photo on a liveleak type site bearing a passing resemblance to "Nicole" and decided to troll/and or shock people. 4chan type behaviour.
Do you find it suspicious that the mod of !nicoled@lemmy.world is downvoting us? Their account was made an hour ago, and they made it just for that community.
In fact, their account just got banned.
Edit: oh, look at that, another fresh account, 4 mins ago. @extension@lemmings.world, you're free to explain us why
you really want a nicoled community huh, are you perhaps the one behind the nicole spam?
I noticed that too - this is really odd.
Definitely curious if nothing else. I don't have access to voter logs so I hadn't noticed.
I kinda speculate that it's an unrelated troll as well. No reason why it wouldn't be tbh.
So I will mention I got a few of the standard Nicole spams (picture of girl alive and well, the familiar text) originating from days old accounts on sh.itjust.works. At least two accounts, each sent the message more than once before I blocked them, each were a couple days old with no other activity. Easy to believe the original actor opened a couple accounts to spam from.
Didn't see this move coming.
So wait just to clarify, you got some new "regular Nicole" spam today, sent after the whole dead body spam occurred?
no not today. a few days ago.
I mentioned it in our main community, and I think they ratcheted up the security about it to the point that it'll throw a "not found" error if I even click on links to the Nicoled community.
Oh boy. I saw I got a Direct Message from preprintingstem@lemmy.cif.su with an imgur link that was supposed to just display, but luckily instead I just saw 
and no image. Didn't open because wasn't sure if it was NSFL spam, eventually opened and saw the usual Nicole copypasta. I was going to go to the Nicoled community and ask, as well as report spam from an account not called nicole for once, it's locked, so now I'm here. Absolutely not checking that image in case it's a dead body picture and not the usual Nicole.
Is someone making some kind of weird storytelling with a character? Weird "meme" to spread on lemmy
Is there a way to block images from being sent to us in messages?
Yeah I woke up to that and it was fucked
Sorry to hear
Has anyone actually got any proof of the images being sent? People are claiming that the message just self deletes and they just suddenly forgot that screenshot is a thing. How are the police not involved at this point if that many people have received these supposed dead Nicole pictures. If this is a joke it’s in pretty bad taste
Update: further down in the thread there is a link to someone describing the image. It sounds like to me that there's no way these could be connected. The "killer" would have to be the one taking the creep shots on the web cam, then also somehow be the mortician too? I wouldn't be surprised if it was someone who was tired of the whole Nicole thing so they decided to "kill her" off. But for some fucked up reason they used actual gore.
Yeah the dead woman was found on a gore website I think, taken from a Chinese morgue? It's definitely sent by a different actor. Both the gore spammer and the regular "Nicole" spam is still ongoing in parallel too, following their respective patterns.
I wouldn't be surprised if it was someone who was tired of the whole Nicole thing so they decided to "kill her" off.
Well, they definitely succeeded at that, given how the whole thing has been locked down.
The message does not self delete.
What people are seeing is the action of admins to remove the content from your inboxes. A recent Lemmy update provides admins the ability to ban users and remove their content including DMs. The quicker instances are banning the spam accounts very rapidly, some even with automation. The best thing you can do if you receive spam is to report it so your admins can act.
Editing to add- The most recent build 0.19.11 also removes images sent in DMs on the webui. Apps and cached files may still show the images to some users.
That makes more sense. Thank you for clarifying!
Yeah I need proof, send me the image
Just a bunch of people with lots of free time trying to create drama in my opinion
I'll just wait for the Barely Sociable or Nexpo episode.
Good luck, it doesn’t exist. If it does it will be very obviously photoshopped. At least obvious enough for authorities to be not treating it as a possible murder
Photoshop? That's only for professional design and photo editing these days right? I mean, why do all the trouble yourself when AI can do it better. I never use Photoshop anymore because of this.
Bizarre turn of events
I saw the pic and feel like it really could be the same person. Their face was destroyed so I don't get why people are confidently saying it's fake
I really hope it’s not. I just thought she was annoying, but I didn’t want it all to end up like this. I wanted her to stop spamming us and get her medical degree 😦
If I were spamming people to hell and back I'd find some small Twitch streamer and use their face instead of my own, then use some friends' lives as loose inspiration to make an identity. No way in hell would I want consequences for spamming blowing back on me, identifiable via my own face (reverse image search perhaps, or an acquaintance on Lemmy) and information. I'm pretty sure whoever is behind the Nicole spam is not the person in the pictures.
Although I appreciate your goodwill towards people who annoy you, too often I see ill will and I wonder if it is the usual hyperbolic frustration venting and they don't actually want to hurt this person, or if it's a "you actually want to hurt them? I thought you were joking…" situation.