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.
This is what happens when you get your world views from right wing basement dwellers.
No, what happened is much simpler: I checked the biggest (at the time) instance, lemmygrad, and they had a warning about the kind of place that is. Here’s the link https://lemmygrad.ml/post/668436 and one of the top comments, at the time the top one https://lemmygrad.ml/comment/403994
Not a great start isn’t it? So I check the second biggest option, Lemmy.ml and… it looked pretty similar, even if not explicitly so. I did 2 + 2 and went back to reddit knowing that there was no alternative at the end of the month. (A couple days later I read that thousands of people joined and as such diluted things, and here I am)
Then I come here with a little hazy memory and help answer a question… making the mistake of conflating the two instances. Downvotes clearly inform me of the thing, and I just own up my fuck up. Like the saying goes, never attribute to malice what can be explained by stupidity.
Side note, “Freedom of speech” and “no censorship” are admirable ideals, until you figure out that showing off weapons in protest against things you don’t like is neither of those, and demonizing a whole group of people because of what they are born as is oppression.