[tomphoolery]

The choice of DVCS tooling is ancillary to the success of GitHub. People learned Git so they could use GitHub, not the other way around. At least, this is the way I remember it.

If someone comes along and builds the best forge software ever, but uses Mercurial instead of Git, I'll bet a lot of people would switch technologies at some point. Until then, I'd say most people use GitHub because GitHub works for them, and they use Git because that's how you interact with GitHub. They don't care about the ivory tower benefits of their particular DVCS tooling, all they care about is easily collaborating with their teammates.

It would definitely be great if you could have a GitHub-like experience using Mercurial or Darcs, but so far I haven't seen anything close to that.

[aayjaychan]

Does GitLab count as a GitHub-like experience? There is a fork of GitLab called Heptapod that supports Mercurial.

https://heptapod.net/