Should we care about a monoculture around a local used/hosted, open source tool?

I might worry about a monoculture around a hosted service like github, but not git itself.

Yes, we should. Remember when GCC had no open source competition? Things have been much better since clang came out.

Or consider openssl since libressl came out. Yes it's possible that codebase improvements would have happened anyways, but having open source competition is great.

I'm sorry because both the ui and the underlying model of Mercurial is factually Better than git

> is factually Better than git

It obviously isn't 'factually' better - that's a matter of opinion not fact.

And in my experience, both Mercurial's model and UI is very over-complicated with far too many concepts. Git has a smaller number of simpler primitives and primitive operations. I think that makes the underlying model of Git better and that's why I prefer it.

I would love a competitor with significant benefits. Git has plenty of warts.

As it stands, it's just a lot easier to use Git everywhere though, just so developers don't have to learn a new tool.

https://pijul.org/ is the only somewhat somewhat interesting alternative I know about, but it's implementation is in alpha territory, and development seems dead.

As one of the authors, I can tell you that Pijul development has never been as alive as today. It isn't public yet for a variety of reasons, but will be very soon.

May I suggest that you write something like that on the webpage? It looks really disappointing with the last activity from 2019 at the moment

That's great to hear!

Pijul is an interesting young alternative: https://pijul.org/