Too many people are confusing the two. Whenever lemmy.ml or its devs do something stupid, people go “Lemmy is getting worse and worse,” or “I’m leaving Lemmy,” or worse, “I’m leaving for Beehaw.”
If you’re using Beehaw, then you’re using Lemmy. Lemmy is the software these instances run on. If you don’t like lemmy.ml, join another instances that have rules that match your philosophy. Some instance hosts authoritarian or fascist shit? Turn to another Lemmy instance. Lemmy.ml is not even the biggest instance. People who just joined and are unfamiliar with the platform will just think the entire Lemmyverse is run by autocratic admins if we don’t get our terminology right.
This is aggravated on Reddit by karma based moderation, e.g. minimum karma to post. This resulted in bots that repost popular content and / or copy popular comments to farm karma so they can bypass these tools.
Having moderated on Reddit, there’s a good reason for min karma to post. It cuts spam account posting massively.
I have no doubt it used to work, but if you’ve ever browsed /popular or /all, it doesn’t work any more. Bots farm karma for a few weeks, then hits 30 or 40 different communities with the same crypto spam. The bot gets banned, and another takes it place.