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.
Like another commenter said, the most basic explanation is that it’s the literal opposite of “cringe”.
The more nuanced explanation is that it was a term co-opted from hip-hop, originally used to celebrate pure expressions of individuality, personal style, and/or personal belief. It was quickly appropriated by internet reactionaries to celebrate anti-liberal and anti-left sentiments, often ones that were explicitly unpopular or socially unacceptable. Eventually it kind of entered the mainstream internet culture and was sanitized by ironic re-appropriation to mean “the opposite of cringe, even admirable, but possibly a difficult position to defend for any number of reasons”.