As I understand it everyone is being paid peanuts to write these days so to make a living they have to churn out a ton of stuff which means attention to detail goes by the wayside
I'm guessing a lot of that are townhomes built on old cleared lots. The supply of affordable SFH in a lot of cities is pretty slim but these townhouses are going up all over the place and you can fit 4-6 of them on the same lot some old run down 1950s house used to occupy.
Was always really surprised everyone thought it was a great idea to jump ship to a browser made by the largest dataminer and internet ad company in the world. What's happening right now with Chrome and YouTube is entirely unsurprising. It was just a matter of time.
Also the implication that countries outside the US don't have dumpy stores is laughable. Europe's got plenty of stuff like this, just usually not as large. Here in the Netherlands we have shops like Action and grocery stores like Lidl and they're a shitshow inside most of the time.
I've used both for a while now. Here's some general reasons someone might prefer Bluesky:
It has a better sorta algorithmic feed that does a decent job of showing you stuff you might be interested in compared to Mastodon
It's presently not fragmented across a bunch of servers who may or may not federate with each other
Other than getting the initial invite, it's way less convoluted to use/understand for the average person
It looks and behaves more like Twitter. A lot of people just want Twitter without the Elon bullshit
And in my specific case, the quality and volume of the high talent art community is way higher and that's what I want to be seeing a lot of on a Twitter-like website. I was on mastodon.art and it's largely amateurish stuff that clogs the instance and their moderation team is not for everyone to put it lightly.
I'm all for fediverse, but the fact of the matter is that Mastodon leaves a lot to be desired if you just were looking for a new home after Twitter. And to an extent that's just a matter of taste. A lot of people don't give a shit about the righteous Activity Pub mission, they just want an online town square where the people and things they want to follow are readily available and the vibe is generally friendly. Simple as.
I'm on both Mastodon and Bluesky, but I'd be lying if I said that Bluesky wasn't clearly a better experience for me at the moment given what I'd like out of a social media platform. I hope Mastodon improves over time and that changes, but it ain't there right now.
I have mixed feelings on bluesky, but in any case its continued development is very bad for twitter so I consider this a net positive any way you look at it
As I understand it everyone is being paid peanuts to write these days so to make a living they have to churn out a ton of stuff which means attention to detail goes by the wayside