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.
No matter what his views are, I don’t remember him ever censoring lemmy.ml because of it. In my experience he’s always been trying to be as objective as possible, going as far as wanting to pay for instances that specifically don’t align with his views (In the beginning lemmy had a lot of users who were in favour of communism and often also China).