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.
I couldn’t have said it better.
I haven’t seen that much of a problem on Lemmy.ml, so I think you really have to dig down into it to find the dirt. I think some people have a problem with the admins political views, so they try to smear them any chance they can. But those same admin made lemmygrad as a place to kinda keep all that stuff separate from the main instance.
Sure, it seeps over sometimes, but the bulk of the content on lemmy.ml is just standard shit. Reddit was no different. Most subreddits were normal and there were a few ones that were full of imbalanced idiots. That didn’t make people leave the site completely. We just didn’t sub to the subreddits we didn’t like. In a similar vein, just block the communities here that you don’t want to see.
As far as the “too many communities” discussion goes… we’re never going to win that battle. The majority of people out there aren’t willing to make the change to the fediverse because of this one issue. Most likely a true Reddit alternative will be made and most normies will move there in time.
It’s great that Lemmy has gained some popularity, but there are too many issues here for it ever to become as big as something like Reddit.