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.
It seems to me that community choice in Lemmy is far less important than community choice is in Mastodon. In Mastodon you subscribe to some people or maybe some lists but you’re largely dependent upon what types of local traffic are happening. I couldn’t reliably fill my feed with interesting people in Mastodon. With Lemmy, I’m filling my feed with interesting communities, while the content with a lot of these communities is still kind of light It’s at least enough to keep me relatively interested. I don’t have to rely on the local splarg to keep me entertained.
Maybe a third to a half of my lemmy subscriptions are remote I’ve only blocked a handful of idiots. The experience thus far as better than Reddit honestly.
If you have not been on mastodon lately. I’d suggest a revisit.
As part of my migration to Lemmy I did and found the experience much improved. It way easier to find channels to follow from all various instances.
Now my main focus was on getting good news feed set up - which is pretty mainstream need. So if your needs are more niche it may still be a pain.
I was there last week. I followed the tech news people when they finally made the mass exodus in the wake of twitter. It’s more or less just full of news and my local community theme. The biggest pain is when a guy who posts news I love just boost the crap out of everyone. No, I want to see his articles, not how much he likes that person’s cat pictures.
I prefer lemmy and karma indicators.
One of the biggest things I dislike about Twitter, too. I don’t care what these people retweet or whatever. I want to see their posts. It’s a pain in the ass to navigate through a flood of retweets.