HOUSEKEEPING NOTICE: Today is the first of twelve successive Mondays which I am taking as research days from my full-time paying job as an academic librarian at the University of Manitoba. During this time, I am finally tackling two long-delayed tasks:
- Updating and reorganizing my list of social VR, virtual worlds, and metaverse platforms (to which I add new platforms as I write about them on my blog; and
- Updating and reorganizing the more detailed spreadsheet, a comparison chart of social VR platforms (here’s a direct link to a read-only copy of that spreadsheet).
Of these two, I have decided to immediately start on the second project, which I have not worked on since 2019 (but I would like to thank Dr. Fran Babcock, who made some updates to this spreadsheet in 2021).
This task is long overdue, and there are many entries of metaverse platforms which have shut down since the first version of this spreadsheet, among them:
- AltspaceVR, which closed almost a year ago, on March 10th, 2023;
- NeosVR, which announced on its Discord server on September 21st, 2023 that most of the software development team had officially parted ways with CEO Karel Hulec (the staff who left are now working on a new social VR platform called Resonite); and
- Tivoli Cloud VR (which closed on February 20th, 2022) was a social VR platform based on the original open-source code of High Fidelity, the Philip Rosedale-helmed company which shuttered its doors as a metaverse platform way back in 2019, choosing to refocus the company around its spatial audio technology. However, two other social VR platforms using HiFi’s codebase, Vircadia and Overte are still up and running, at least, the last time I checked!
- Helios, an Unreal-based social VR platform which actually came and went before I even had a chance to add it to the spreadsheet!
But, to me, the saddest of the shutdowns arrived this month, when Mozilla announced in a blogpost on February 15th, 2024:
On February 13, 2024, Mozilla announced an organization-wide restructuring impacting a number of products housed within the Mozilla Corporation. Unfortunately, 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...
While we hope that Hubs can have a vibrant life outside of Mozilla, there are a number of pieces of Hubs that will end as part of the shutdown. These include the Hubs Demo Server (hubs.mozilla.com) and the Managed Subscription, the two services actively maintained by Mozilla that most of our users rely on.
Last October, Mozilla announced that it had decided to discontinue the Hubs Cloud hosting service, which ran on AWS (Amazon Web Services). In its place, the company announced the Hubs Cloud Community Edition:
Community Edition is designed to help developers deploy the full Hubs stack on any Linux-based infrastructure, including AWS, Google Cloud, and even your own computer. In the same way that Hubs Cloud mimicked how the Hubs team ran the server managed by Mozilla, Community Edition mimics the infrastructure our team uses for the managed subscription service. Community Edition simplifies and automates most of the complex deployment process using Kubernetes, which is a containerized software orchestration system.
The obvious benefit of a solution like Community Edition is that it gives developers more choices for hosting Hubs. The less obvious benefit is that it offers greater flexibility when dealing with significant updates to a hosting platform. In the past, if there was a major update to the AWS platform, Hubs Cloud developers had to wait for our team to release a new version of AWS launch configuration. Community Edition eliminates this limitation.
Unlike Hubs Cloud, Community Edition is designed for developers who are well-versed with the full Hubs stack and comfortable navigating cloud hosting platforms. While we will be providing examples and guidance on how to host Community Edition, we will not designate a primary hosting platform, as we did with AWS for Hubs Cloud. Community Edition users will be responsible for researching, evaluating, and staying informed about the hosting options available to them.
Setting up Community Edition will require more effort than many of our current Hubs Cloud customers may be accustomed to. However, we believe that this direction best empowers our developer community. Many of you have already chosen to bootstrap and self-host the codebase on your own instead of using Hubs Cloud, and we hope that Community Edition will offer a more straight-forward approach for achieving your goals.
In the Feb. 15th announcement, Mozilla stated that the sunset plan and timeline for Hubs Cloud has not been changed. The company has already ceased support for Hubs Cloud on AWS as of January 1st, 2024, however existing Hubs Cloud instances will not be automatically shut off, as the FAQs section of the October 2023 announcement explains:
We will be ceasing to support Hubs Cloud on AWS starting on January 1, 2024. Existing Hubs Cloud instances will not be automatically shut off on January 1. On that date, we will de-list Hubs Cloud from the AWS marketplace to disable new sign-ups. Existing customers will then have a minimum of 90 days to migrate to another Hubs service before their subscriptions to Hubs Cloud come to an end. The earliest date for these subscriptions to cease will be March 30th…
Developers may continue to use their subscription and manually maintain their instances until we fully remove Hubs Cloud from the AWS marketplace (March 30th, 2024 at the earliest). After January 1, it is difficult to predict which AWS platform updates released will impact current Hubs Cloud customers, given the variability in current Hubs Cloud instances. Many customers, whose instances were created years ago, may not have kept their code current with the updates that have been released. However, if you have experience with AWS development, there’s no reason you cannot manually troubleshoot these issues yourself to continue using your existing instance…
We are currently working on tools to automate the data migration process from existing Hubs Cloud instances to Community Edition and Managed Subscription instances. These tools may vary from platform to platform, however expect to see them released in the lead-up to January 1st. Join our Discord server and check out the #community-edition channel to stay tuned!
Here’s the shutdown timeline, provided by Mozilla in its Feb. 2024 blogpost:
- March 1st, 2024: The creation of new subscriptions will be disabled. Existing subscriptions will be able to continue using their instances until the full shutdown is complete. The demo server will continue to function as normal.
- April 1st, 2024: A tool to download your data will be released. Demo users and subscribers will be able to begin downloading their data.
- May 31, 2024: Existing subscription instances and the demo server will be turned off. All Mozilla-run community resources and platforms will also be turned off.
From this timeline, it sounds as though the official Mozilla Hubs Discord server will also be shutting down on May 31st (I have just posted a question in that Discord to confirm that assumption, though, and I will report back). I am also somewhat concerned that all the links to join the Mozilla Hubs Discord server in the Feb. 15th blogpost give me errors, but I have generated a new invite link here (and reported the problem in their Discord):
So, all of this means that Hubs users have some difficult decisions to make over the next few months, as the sunset timeline marches ahead. However, the future looks promising for Hubs to continue as an open-source, community-run initiative. As Mozilla states in their sunset blogpost:
Hubs’ code is open source, which means that it can have a life outside of Mozilla. Since [the February 15th] announcement, many former Hubs team members have returned to the Discord server to remind the community that Hubs was built with life outside of Mozilla in mind. The project’s commitment to open source and focus on self-hosted versions of Hubs mean that no one entity can determine Hubs’ future; only this community can do that.
And (as we have seen with Tivoli Cloud VR, Vircadia, and Overte springing from High Fidelity), there is already precedent in having a metaverse platform move from company-run to community-run (albeit with varying degrees of success!). I wish the team at Mozilla, and the Hubs community, nothing but the best during this transition, and I look forward to participating in Hubs Community Edition.
UPDATE Feb. 27th, 2024: Michael Morran, of the Mozilla Hubs team, has responded to my questions about the Hubs Discord server and the invite link:
Hey Ryan, thanks for the write-up. The broken link is not intentional, so I’ll update that now. As far as what happens to the discord after May 31, we are currently unsure what Mozilla can transfer over to the community, but we hope to get clarity on this soon.
Thanks, Michael! Here’s the updated invite link for the Mozilla Hubs Discord server.
