Mozilla is restructuring a number of products housed within the Mozilla Corporation, including Hubs that will be shut down later this year.
What does this mean for Mozilla-run Hubs servers and services?
While Hubs can continue to live on outside of Mozilla as an open-source project, some aspects of Hubs 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. Additionally, the sunset plan and timeline for Hubs Cloud has not changed; for more information about the Hubs Cloud sunset, please see our announcement from last fall.
Shutdown Timeline
This is a multi-month process, with the goal of concluding Mozilla’s work on Hubs by May 31, 2024. Here are the key date:
- March 1, 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 1, 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, as well as all Mozilla-run community resources and platforms.
What happens to my data and assets?
UPDATE: The data download tool has been released! To get started, please read this blog post. We have also released a tutorial video and written documentation on using this tool.
All data on Hubs is associated with user email addresses. In early April, we plan to release a tool for you to download all uploaded media associated with your email, these include 3D models, audio files, image files and video files uploaded through Spoke, as well as gLTFs of published spoke scenes and avatars. This tool will also make it possible to retrieve all Hubs URLs, including scene URLs, room URLs, avatar URLs and spoke project URLs.
For the demo server, users will be able to download the data associated with your email address only. In addition to assets you have created, we plan to open source these assets before the shutdown and as many of the original .blend files as we can.
How you can help
You can help your fellow community members in the following ways:
- Share this news. Hubs has users from every corner of the world, and we need your help to spread the word so that everyone has time to consider their options during this transition.
- Get started with Community Edition. Many community members, including those without Kubernetes experience, have successfully set up instances by following our published tutorials. It is helpful to answer questions, document your process, and, if you can, contribute to Community Edition to improve it.
- Share tutorials for migrating to other platforms. We know that Community Edition won’t be the right fit for everyone. Many community members will need help making the leap to other services where their assets are compatible. Please consider writing a migration tutorial and submitting it to our Creator Labs blog: https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSegEBt70aoZ4oWzlpShkijpS2zvbwcBph7HQuzSRYDDNEU0MQ/viewform
- Share and celebrate the work of the wonderful people who make up this community. Throughout the coming months, we will be organizing community celebration events and do our best to document all of the amazing work that has been done so far with Hubs. Consider sharing your projects in #show-and-tell and leave some encouraging comments for other creators.
- Take care and time to reflect. This news is sudden, but we have time and an incredibly supportive community to support you. Don’t be afraid to get involved and ask for help.
