to be honest, this should have been done way earlier.

It's pretty obvious ...

What's scary is how many people just accepted that some woman wanted to randomly spam thousands of pictures with her smoking weed.

Agreed. When the images started to change it got really creepy.

Dont render images in private message (#3043)

https://join-lemmy.org/news/2025-04-08_-_Lemmy_Release_v0.19.11

Honestly I think the easiest thing would be to not allow images or embedding at all in PMs and perhaps display a warning message when clicking links "you are leaving [instance name]..."

Analyzing potentially lots of text and images in an effort to "guarantee" safety of users is likely a sisyphusian endeavour that is bound to fail - and furthermore also has privacy issues (namely that "private" messages aren't private at all)

So was it last week or the day before yesterday? It all happens so fast, I can't - and frankly - refuse to catch up.

Yeah, I've been targeted by enough romance spam that I just assume any photo of a woman I don't know was probably stolen from some random Tumblr or Instagram.

Yes, as that is how "she" initially introduced herself

I always thought it was weird how much attention people were paying to span messages. Giving them that much attention only serves whatever purpose they have.

I broke up with her for this reason.

with the content i've seen it gave me more of an impression of being captures of a live stream, but that's just guessing

She looks to me like a college student attending an online class. Looks like it's shot on a laptop's built-in camera, lighting is whatever, she's dressed casually and comfortably, facial expression is neutral or even bored...

If you're taking a college class via Zoom, can you see your classmates' webcams?

we looked into it, we currently believe that to be a copycat not related to the other pms.

the lemmy.world account involved in that was most certainly compromised from an unrelated data breach and all connections originated from IPs linked to an anonymization service, so there's also not much to follow up on.

we will reconsider this if it happens again.

I don't know if others have, I only know that we (Lemmy.World, Fedihosting Foundation) have not reported it to the police.

I don't have high hopes that the police would be able to do anything about this. For the harassment against the person shown in the images, that would likely have to be reported by them directly for the police to take that up.
For random online spam, as in harassment of fediverse users receiving the PMs, that seems like it would be an extremely low priority for police. It's also likely fairly difficult to impossible to follow up on, considering that the person sending the PMs most likely used a VPN to access these accounts.

Would rather more positive lore, but I guess it is fediverse lore. Just checked from curiosity, all but 2 messages I have got are from Nicole bots, 1 was another spammer and the other an automated "welcome to this community" bot message.

Remember that guy who wanted to know how not to poop for three days!?

I'm just guessing here, but maybe a rejected suitor? Or a person they're beefing with? A mentally ill person who found these pictures and decided to direct their hate at them? People do all sorts of weird stuff for all sorts of weird reasons.