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.
So, I guess I just don’t get why it’s set up this way.
Say you have asklemmy, am I correct in understanding that there’s a separate instance of asklemmy for each federated instance? Like I can go over to beehaw and see their asklemmy, another instance has a different one, and so on.
Because, seems to me this produces a bunch of small disjointed communities with little content and are seldom updated.