Mozilla shuts down AR/VR meta-universe social platform Hubs, hands open source over to community

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(XR Navigation Network February 18, 2024) Mozilla has announced that it will shut down the meta-universe, which has been in operation for nearly six years, within the yearsocial contactPlatform Hubs.
诸如Hubs Demo Server（hubs.mozilla.com）和Managed Subscription这两个由Mozilla积极维护的服务将会关停。另外，Mozilla以后不再继续积极开发或维护Hubs代码库和其他社区资源。

不过，尽管官方将不再运维，但由于Hubs的代码开源，这意味着它可以在Mozilla之外继续存在。换句话说，如果社区愿意，个人和集体可以继续维持Hubs的存在。目前Mozilla的重点之一是帮助尽可能多的人跳转到完全独立于Mozilla且完全开源的Community Edition Community Edition.

Mozilla launched Hubs, a meta-universe social platform for the Web, in April 2018, allowing users to coalesce in the same space by simply clicking on the appropriate link.

For more than five years, Mozilla has provided the Hubs community with the ability to upload resources, create worlds, and host parties, and on the demo server, users created 115,732 custom characters, 215,923 scenarios, and hosted parties for nearly 10 million attendees, the team said. This represents a tremendous amount of creativity, innovation and time.

Despite achieving the above numbers, this doesn't hide the reality that Hubs wasn't favored by too many users. Now, Mozilla has finally decided to shut down Hubs.

relevantblog postIn it, Mozilla writes: "We look forward to having more time to review the full history of the Hubs program, including where we succeeded, where we fell short, how we feel about its end, and the overall legacy of Hubs. For now, however, our only goal is to provide you with support."

The team plans to complete the shutdown by May 31, 2024, according to the presentation. Here are the key dates:

• March 1, 2024: creating new subscriptions will be disabled. Existing subscriptions will be able to continue to use their instances until the full shutdown is complete. Demo servers will continue to function normally.

• April 1, 2024: a tool to download data will be released. Demo users and subscribers will be able to start downloading their data.

• May 31, 2024: existing subscription instances and demo servers will be shut down. All Mozilla-operated community resources and platforms will be shut down.

However, even though officially it will no longer be run and maintained, the fact that Hubs' code is open source means that it can continue to exist outside of Mozilla, which says, "This means that no single entity can determine the future of Hubs, only this community can."

This company says that quite a few people are already in the process of migrating to Community Edition community edition. As a note, Community Edition is a fully open source version of the Hubs codebase, and you can run it on any platform that supports Kubernetes. Unlike Hubs Cloud or hosted subscriptions, Community Edition instances are completely independent of Mozilla, which has been working with community developers since its release to create documentation for how to host Community Edition on numerous platforms.

One of the team's focuses over the next few months will be to help as many people as possible make the jump to Community Edition Community Edition as the official phasing out of the sections run by Mozilla. They write, "As the future of Hubs is handed over to the community, we hope to see these groups grow over the next few months."