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.
They’re getting external funding: https://nlnet.nl/project/Lemmy/index.html
Yeah, they get paid depending on the features they deliver; which may or may not be what the community needs, particularly as time-sensitive issues get discovered. Also, what they get paid amounts to below minimum wage. They explain it in a bit more detail here: https://join-lemmy.org/news/2023-06-17_-_Update_from_Lemmy_after_the_Reddit_blackout
So, very different from donations, which come reliably periodically with no strings attached, and can scale very well as usage grows.