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.
Just out of curiosity, what did the devs do that was stupid?
The devs hold extreme political views. They are on board with the Tiananmen Square massacre being necessary and shit like that. Like this post says though, there are plenty of instances that are totally run by normal people. Additionally, the Lemmy server code is open source, so that helps to ensure that it isn’t doing anything nefarious behind-the-scenes.
https://lemmy.ml/post/1167199
More details in the link above, here is the introduction:
"My concern is that users are being banned and content is being removed on lemmy.ml citing a rule that is not publicly stated anywhere that I have seen.
Moderators of lemmy.ml are removing posts and comments which are critical of the Chinese government and are banning their authors."
So, the dev is another /u/spez.