gitweb requires server setup, while Mercurial web ui can quickly start locally without any configuration and that was the one of mercurial selling point until github and other services arrives.
I think the way you're using hg's web UI is slightly different to the uses I think of for sites like GitHub, BitBucket or SourceHut.
A web UI is fine for being able to see the different commits, and files at different points in time.
But people also make use of GitHub as a hosted repository for sharing code with others, as an issue tracker, and for doing code review etc. -- for sharing things outside a local network, there's the understanding that either you're paying someone else to host it, or you're making effort to host it yourself, so "requires setup" isn't much of an issue.
"sourcehut competes with bitbucket" puts more emphasis on the latter than the former.
Can you make "sr.ht git services" the blue title of the repo "card" and "~sircmpwn/git.sr.ht" - the subtitle (with dimmed color)? This simple change will improve UI usability in 10x times.
I think the proper UI fix would be to split the username (sircmpwn) from the repo name (git.sr.ht) and make them two separate links divided by a non-link " / ".
This is what github does and I feel like it's a standard people expect, similar to having the logo of a page on the top left.
The former is a human-readable text which allow eye to easy understand and latter is a technical info which is not required to have space on the screen and makes UI "hard to use".
I wouldn't consider the repository name any more technical in nature than the name of a CD or film. I think it makes sense to have the title be more prominent than the description of what it does.
The homepage links to https://git.sr.ht/~sircmpwn/?search=sr.ht (EDIT: which is now also the URL in the blogpost with the link text "100% open source software")
There are also Hg repos at hg.sr.ht; idk how easy it is to find git.sr.ht from hg.sr.ht.
> how can they beat Bitbucket while the code is unusable
Well, for Hg users, it's not like there's going to be much of a choice in a year (given BB is sunsetting Hg support), right?