That change was so dumb. Mercurial support was the bit that put them as something different from github. Once they didn't have it anymore, why would anyone use them at all?
So since you are knowledgeable about the fact that this decision was "dumb", you must also know approximately what proportion of their users were dependent on hg for their workflow ? My priors would put it at less - likely far less - than 1%. But please share your knowledge.
In the announcement they mentioned that less than 1% of new users were choosing hg. It was probably slightly higher for old users.
> In fact, Mercurial usage on Bitbucket is steadily declining, and the percentage of new Bitbucket users choosing Mercurial has fallen to less than 1%.
FWIW I had stuff on Bitbucket from the Before Atlassian times, in Hg repos. And while I had let it bitrot a bit (too complicated to work on open source stuff with my employer at the time), once they dropped Mercurial support I saw no point in moving it to git and keeping it there so I just pulled it off and move it to github.
I'm sure I'm not the only one. The compelling story about Bitbucket for me was Mercurial.
Still seems near-sighted. If someone started a new mercurial project what would they choose to host it on? BitBucket basically automatically wins new users by being the only player in the game
Not true. I looked at the complete list of hosted projects on Bitbucket just when it was shut down and I recall that at least 10% of all repos ever created on Bitbucket were hg repos.
If i recall correctly the server/enterprise version was completely separate product written in java (as opposed to python which powered original bitbucket.com). I think the java eventually subsumed the cloud product but not too sure of that
They still have a much better PR/review workflow than github. (Imagine github if reviewing showed changes since your last review by default, and it worked, and you didn't have to make junk comments to get something to count as a review, and comments didn't get lost).
I'm sure they knew what they did. They probably primarily had git users on the service, and the motivation to use Bitbucket is most likely because you already pay for other Atlassian products.
The hosted Bitbucket and Bitbucket Server (formerly called Stash) only share the name. They are completely different implementations and Bitbucket Server never supported Mercurial.