Mozilla Hubs

» see hubs.mozilla.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the last words ~

i was on firefox throughout the hubs years. i never opened it. mozilla shipped hubs in april '18 as a browser-based vr social space, accessible without a headset, and i kept reading about it in the mozilla blog and the firefox release notes without ever following the link in. that is the honest profile of how most firefox users met hubs (probably). it was the proof-of-concept that webxr was technically possible at consumer scale. the proof shipped. for whatever reason nobody really gathered.

mozilla's social mixed reality team launched hubs on april 26 2018 as the first product out of their xr research effort. the bet was that the open web should be the substrate for shared virtual presence, not a walled garden owned by facebook or microsoft. you opened a hubs link in any webxr-capable browser. you gave yourself a name and walked into a 3d room. if you owned a headset, hubs used it. if you did not, the room was still navigable with mouse and keyboard.

mozilla added hubs cloud in may 2020 as a self-hosted aws-based version for organizations that wanted private deployments. the same year, mozilla shut down most of its xr development as part of a broader restructuring. hubs survived the 2020 cuts. it did not survive the 2024 ones. mozilla announced the end of support in february '24 and shut the demo server plus the hubs cloud subscriptions on may 31 2024. the codebase moved to the hubs foundation, an independent nonprofit that continues to run a community edition of the platform.

~ the record ~

~ how it landed ~

anyway, hubs was unusual for its category in being headset-optional from day one. altspacevr in '15 had taken the same headset-optional approach but with a desktop client (in graves). hubs leapfrogged the install step by running entirely inside the browser, using a-frame and the webxr standards that mozilla had spent years pushing through the w3c. you sent someone a hubs link and they were inside the room within twenty seconds.

the use case mozilla pitched was small-meeting webxr rather than mass-scale events. classrooms and distributed teams. the room size limit was 24 active participants on the demo server, which kept the rooms small enough to feel like rooms instead of arenas. that scope choice probably extended hubs' lifespan past sansar and high fidelity, both of which (in graves) were chasing the metaverse-scale dream.

~ what it became ~

anyway, the pandemic was hubs' real moment, the same as it was altspacevr's. webxr conferences ran out of hubs rooms throughout 2020 and 2021. mozilla's own all-hands events happened there. a small academic community formed around it for ethnographic and educational research, where the privacy properties of a mozilla-hosted webxr platform actually mattered. for that audience hubs was the only option.

the demo server numbers mozilla released at shutdown listed 115,732 custom avatars and 215,923 scenes hosted. close to ten million people had visited across hubs' six years. for whatever reason those numbers were never going to support a sustainable mozilla product at the scale firefox needed. mozilla had been propping up hubs as a research project and as a vision artifact, and by '24 the vision had run out of internal sponsors.

~ the long tail ~

anyway, the hubs foundation took over the codebase in march 2024 and continues to maintain hubs community edition as a self-hostable open source project. the github repo is alive. a few small commercial deployments persist, mostly inside universities. the webxr standards mozilla pushed through standards bodies remain in chrome and other browsers, even as mozilla has scaled back its participation. that is the better outcome than hubs itself surviving: the substrate stays open.

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