why "was"? mercurial is still around, and perfectly usable. we use it at work and I've never had any problems with it, it's pretty much as good as git for day to day usage.

There's pretty much nowhere to host your repo now that bitbucket gave up (and outright /deleted/ all hg repos which was criminal, but that's besides the point)

The big three I know of (github, gitlab, bitbucket) are all git-only.

Totally true for the "big three", but Sourcehut hosts mercurial repositories: https://hg.sr.ht/.

(Unaffiliated, but a happy user.)

I'm glad there are some hold outs. It's a great technology it's just not been adopted as much as git. I had to learn git as most job ads specified git.

Mercurial’s tracking of the evolution of patch sets was really useful. GitHub PR’s mostly achieve that even if it’s lost at the native git level.