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.
gamification does drive engagement, though not necessarily the right kind.
In my obervation things that incentivise people to produce lots of simple content to please the masses (and hence net lots of social-media-game-points) significantly decrease the signal-to-noise ratio of the site, with the result that when people are actually trying to find some information or figure something out (rather than just seeking mindless entertainment) they have to wade through lots and lots of meaningless. ignorant and low-effort fluff to find it, and it might not even be there because the kind of people producing the quality (measured in knowledge terms, not “production quality”) content have left.
Just look at Youtube.