Mozilla has announced it will shutter Mozilla Hubs, which includes Hubs Demo Server, Managed Subscription, and community resources.
The web browser developer, Mozilla, said this was the result of the “organisation-wide restructuring” that it revealed last week.
Hubs is due to be shut down on May 31, 2024, with new subscription creations disabled from March 1st. A new tool to download your data will be made available from April 1st, 2024 for demo users and subscribers.
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Mozilla stated that following the shutdown, it will cease active development and maintenance of Hubs codebases and alternative community resources.
In a blog post by the Mozilla Hubs Team, it reassured users that its priority was to support them during this transition:
“Hubs is one of the products impacted and it will be shut down later this year.
“This will be a multi-month process with three members of the Hubs team overseeing the transition.
“We look forward to having more time to reflect on the full history of the Hubs project, where we succeeded, where we came up short, our feelings about it ending, and Hubs’ overall legacy.
“However, right now our only goal is to support you as you have so lovingly supported us after learning this sad news and over the last six years.”
The decision to shutter Hubs is a relatively rapid U-turn from its roadmap expansion plans announced in July last year, designed to scale the platform’s regional coverage to reach a greater number of education and enterprise end users.
Mozilla Hubs has been available to the Hubs community for more than five years, enabling them to create worlds, upload assets, and host meetups.
According to Mozilla, the community has created 115,732 avatars and 215,923 scenes, and hosted meetups for nearly 10 million attendees, which it says represents “an immense amount of creativity, innovation, and time”.
Many of the Hubs team are moving to the Discord server, with three employees remaining at Hubs to help ensure a smooth transition for customers.
Exporting Data
Now, Mozilla is working to ensure that its users are able to download their data from the Hubs platform.
To this end, it is releasing a tool to allow users to download all of the media connected to their email, such as 3D models, image files, audio files, and video files.
The tool will also enable the retrieval of all Hubs URLs, like room URLs, scene URLs, avatar URLs, and spoke project URLs.
While demo server users will only be able to download data associated with their email address, it will be possible for subscribers to download data from all their related email accounts.
Moreover, it is planning to make all the avatars, scenes, and other assets published by the Hubs team open-source assets so that they can continue to be used beyond the shutdown date.
Continued Support
Aside from the upcoming release of the data download tool, Mozilla will support its Hubs customers by making itself available to answering questions, creating tutorials, and hosting gatherings with its remaining team.
The community meetups will include both its regular Friday afternoon meetups and additional Community Edition Setup meetings to offer step by step instructions for setting up Community Edition instances.
