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.
Bots farmed karma on reddit because mods on some subs tied rights to participation to minimum karma. So bots were sent elsewhere, where mods were more relaxed, and farmed until they reached the target sub’s karma requirement. Then the accounts were sold to advertisers and astroturf campaigns to sway posts or sell up/down votes.
Without karma there’s no incentive to do any of this. I’m sure there are spammers and farmers thinking how to exploit lemmy right now. But just not having karma is a massive advantage. I still think that admins and mods should be able to see some user stat that aggregated bad behavior. Like number of removed posts, removed comments, downvotes, blocks from other users and bans from communities and instances. That way they could decide their actions based on the user reputation, as trolls and spam accounts would accrue a bad reputation really fast, and would encourage users to engage in the moderation process.
True, not having karma is detrimental for advertisers and excellent for users. Let’s hope it never gets introduced.