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.
Not everything here has to be misconstrued to be done out of spite.
I could be mistaken, but I truly believe that a large part of these forks and communities are about providing an alternative platform where there is opportunity for dogma agnostic discussion and constructive criticism beyond name-calling.
Well Lemmy is. It mainly exists because they couldn’t exist on Reddit like they wanted. Ideology plays a huge role in the development of Lemmy. Strictly allowing piracy also was a reason