yes entirely separate. unless the entire “lemmy.fmhy.ml” is identical its a difference instance

Instances have different purposes and for beehaw, maintaining community standards is more important to them then wider federation, they also explicitly said it was a bandwidth issue for their mod team, that as things settle and tools get better for modding within Lemmy itself they’ll reassess. I don’t find that particulary unusual but I’m also a Mastadon user and that’s very common over there

Since Lemmy is based on federated servers like Mastadon the worst that happens is the admins of an instance see the excessive traffic and block the IP.