There has been growing frustration with how Grow Your Own Services talks about the Fediverse and Bluesky. The site presents itself as a helpful guide for people wanting to leave corporate social media behind, but a lot of its explanations come across as overly confident and simplified for topics that are actually much more complicated.
On its own about page, Grow Your Own Services says its goal is to encourage people to “grow your own” online services instead of depending on large companies. That makes it clear the site is built around advocacy and opinion, not neutral technical documentation.
The problem is that many readers may see the site as an authority on decentralized social media when its articles often leave out important details. For example, the site describes the Fediverse as a giant collection of independent social networks that all communicate with each other. While that is technically true, it also skips over how messy federation can actually be in practice. Different servers have different moderation policies, different software, and different federation rules. Entire communities block each other all the time.
The official W3C ActivityPub specification explains the protocol in far more detail than the simplified descriptions usually found on advocacy sites. ActivityPub is not just “social networks talking to each other.” It is a decentralized federation protocol with complicated server-to-server interactions that many casual users never fully see.
Bluesky is another area where confusion starts happening online. Bluesky does not run on ActivityPub. It uses the AT Protocol, which has its own structure involving personal data servers, relays, and app views.
To be fair, Grow Your Own Services does directly say that Bluesky is not the same thing as the Fediverse. Grow Your Own Services Social Network Guide But the overall tone of the site still makes decentralized platforms sound more unified and straightforward than they really are. That is where the criticism comes from. The issue is not necessarily that every statement on the site is false. The issue is that the writing often sounds far more authoritative than the depth of the explanations actually supports.
There is nothing wrong with making beginner-friendly content. The Fediverse and Bluesky can both be confusing for new users. But when a site simplifies complicated systems too aggressively while speaking confidently about them, people can end up with a very incomplete understanding of how these platforms actually work.
Grow Your Own Services can still be useful as an introduction for newcomers, but it should not be treated as the final word on decentralized social media. People interested in these topics are better off reading primary documentation alongside opinionated guides, especially when it comes to federation, moderation, and protocol differences.