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

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.

likely unrelated, but I already forwarded the PM reports we received on LW to .ee admins a few hours ago. probably just a "normal" pm spammer.

unless you operate the instance that is being used to send this material you can generally only work with the content that is being posted/sent in PMs. almost all identifying information is stripped when it leaves your local instance to be federated to other instances. even if there was a group of instances collaborating on e.g. a shared blocklist, abusers would just switch to other instances that aren't part of the blocking network. there's a reason why it's not recommended to run a lemmy instance with open signups if you don't have additional anti-spam measures and a decently active admin team. smaller instances tend to have fewer prevention measures in place, which results in a burden for everyone else in the fediverse that is on the receiving end of such content. unfortunately this is not an easy task to solve without giving up (open) federation.

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.

In that case I want to friend her and tell her to make paper clips