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Mozilla Hubs

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Mozilla Hubs
Information
Type Social VR
Industry Social virtual reality, virtual events
Developer Mozilla (2017-2024); Hubs Foundation (since 2024)
Written In JavaScript (client), Elixir (Reticulum server)
Operating System Web browser
License Mozilla Public License 2.0
Supported Devices VR headsets with WebVR or WebXR browsers, desktop computers, laptops, tablets, mobile phones
Release Date 26 April 2018 (preview)
Website https://hubsfoundation.org


Mozilla Hubs (announced as Hubs by Mozilla and called simply Hubs by its current maintainer) is an open-source Social VR platform that runs in a web browser. A user creates a shared 3D room with one click and invites others by sending its URL; visitors can join from a virtual reality headset, a desktop or laptop computer, or a phone or tablet, with no app to install.[1][2] Mozilla's mixed reality team released it as an experiment on 26 April 2018, built on WebVR and later WebXR.[1][3]

Hubs survived Mozilla's August 2020 layoffs, which closed most of the company's immersive web work, and Mozilla later sold it as a self-hosted product (Hubs Cloud) and as a managed subscription.[4][5] Mozilla ended its own Hubs services on 31 May 2024. The code, the GitHub repositories and the community Discord server passed to the Hubs Foundation, a non-profit set up by Hubs community members, which maintains the self-hosted Hubs Community Edition.[6][7]

Reviewed 6 October 2026. Checked the 2018 launch, Spoke, Discord bot, IEEE VR 2020, Hubs Cloud, 2020 layoffs, 2022-2023 plans, Active Replica, the 2024 shutdown timeline and statistics, Hubs Foundation transfer, recaps and Community Edition releases, documented features and architecture, and the three Frontiers in Virtual Reality studies against the cited sources. About review dates.

History

Launch at Mozilla (2018)

The Hubs client repository on GitHub was created in September 2017, and the project's description still calls it "Duck-themed multi-user virtual spaces in WebVR. Built with A-Frame."[8] Mozilla announced Hubs on 26 April 2018 in a blog post by Sean White as an early preview of "an immersive social experience that is delivered through the browser." The post said Hubs worked on the Oculus Rift, HTC Vive, Daydream and Cardboard viewers, as well as on desktop computers and phones without VR hardware, and that its code was open source.[1]

Launch coverage focused on how little setup it needed. In Road to VR, Ben Lang wrote that a Hubs room could be created and shared as a link, after which participants could voice chat, see each other and handle objects across phones, computers and headsets without downloading an app or making an account.[9] TechCrunch's Lucas Matney described it as "pretty low-key": at launch every visitor appeared as a robot avatar.[10]

Spoke, Discord and Hubs Cloud (2019-2020)

By September 2019 Mozilla had added avatar customization and launched Spoke, a browser-based 3D editor for building the scenes used in Hubs rooms. Mozilla's Liv Erickson wrote in September 2019 that Hubs code was published under the Mozilla Public License and that the team had begun work on tools that would let anyone run a self-hosted copy of the platform with custom branding and their own domain.[11] In April 2019 Mozilla announced a Hubs bot for Discord, described as providing text and voice chat for Hubs communities; in current versions a Hubs room can be bound to a Discord channel.[12][13]

The IEEE VR 2020 conference, which its organizers moved online in early March 2020 because of the COVID-19 pandemic and held from 22 to 26 March, ran its poster sessions, viewing parties, social hours and sponsor rooms on a custom Hubs installation. Mozilla's weekly update of 30 March 2020 called it "the first major conference deployment using Hubs Cloud Enterprise" and reported an increase of about 4.7 times in the number of trailing monthly active rooms on hubs.mozilla.com compared with the end of February, along with 1,800 account sign-ups in the week of the conference.[14][15] On 29 April 2020 Mozilla opened Hubs Cloud in early access on Amazon Web Services, in Personal and Enterprise versions, so that organizations could run Hubs on their own domain and change it as they wished.[16]

In August 2020 Mozilla laid off about 250 of its roughly 1,000 employees and closed most of its immersive web work, including A-Frame, WebVR and WebXR support in Firefox, the WebXR Viewer for iOS and the Firefox Reality browser. Hubs was kept and moved into a new product organization outside Firefox.[4]

Redesign, subscriptions and Community Edition (2021-2023)

In January 2021 Mozilla announced a redesign that added a persistent chat sidebar and separate interfaces for desktop and mobile, noting that the "vast majority of Hubs users" visited rooms on non-VR devices.[17]

At the end of November 2022 Mozilla introduced a paid Hubs subscription at US$20 per month, with account management tools, privacy and security settings to control who can enter a subscriber's Hub, and custom branding of the Hub's home page and color theme. Mozilla said further tiers and a free version would follow, and that it would keep the free hubs.mozilla.com rooms running.[5] Around the same time it acquired Active Replica, a Vancouver startup founded in 2020 by Jacob Ervin and Valerian Denis that had built a virtual events business on Hubs; the terms were not disclosed.[18] A free Starter plan followed on 25 May 2023, limited to 10 concurrent users and 500 MB of storage but including Spoke and avatar and scene management.[19]

On 19 July 2023 Mozilla announced a Professional plan, which added custom domains and a customizable client, and said it would move away from Hubs Cloud on AWS. In its place came Hubs Community Edition, a version of the full Hubs stack that can be deployed with Kubernetes on any major cloud provider or on the operator's own hardware. Mozilla said parts of its infrastructure orchestration had stayed private under Hubs Cloud, while Community Edition would publish the whole stack, and it extended Hubs Cloud support until January 2024.[20] The Community Edition code was committed to the hubs-cloud repository on 16 October 2023.[21]

Shutdown by Mozilla (2024)

On 13 February 2024 Mozilla announced an organization-wide restructuring, and two days later the Hubs team said that Hubs would be shut down. The plan disabled new subscriptions on 1 March 2024, released a data download tool on 1 April and turned off the demo server at hubs.mozilla.com, the subscription instances and Mozilla-run community resources on 31 May 2024. The team also said Mozilla would not develop or maintain the Hubs codebases after the shutdown. In the same post Mozilla reported that users of the demo server alone had created 115,732 custom avatars and 215,923 scenes and that it had hosted meetups for "close to 10 million attendees."[22][23] Writing in Road to VR, Scott Hayden observed that Hubs had not reached the traction of Rec Room, VRChat or Meta's Horizon Worlds.[24]

Mozilla's support page confirms that support ended on 31 May 2024: users can no longer subscribe, use the demo server or create Hubs Cloud instances, and the codebase is managed by the Hubs Foundation.[6]

Hubs Foundation (2024 onward)

Hubs community members announced on 18 May 2024 that they had incorporated a non-profit, the Hubs Foundation, with a minimal board to carry it through the transition and proper elections expected about six months later.[25] On 31 May 2024 the foundation became the official maintainer of the Hubs ecosystem; Mozilla transferred all Hubs-related repositories and the Hubs Discord server to it.[7][26]

The foundation's 2024 year-end recap lists the setup of an official Hubs instance for its meetings and events, the re-uploading of old avatars and scenes to it, a relaunched website, and beginner documentation for setting up a Community Edition instance. The recap also records the use of Hubs in a live musical at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe, Non-Player Character: A Virtual Reality Musical, created by Brendan A Bradley.[27] In 2025 the foundation opened membership and held its first annual general meeting, and it connected the Icosa asset library (which holds many assets from Google Poly) to Spoke.[28][29]

Versions

Version Operator Introduced Status (October 2026)
Demo server (hubs.mozilla.com) Mozilla 26 April 2018[1] Turned off 31 May 2024[6]
Hubs Cloud (Personal and Enterprise, on AWS) Self-hosted, supported by Mozilla Early access 29 April 2020[16] Support extended to January 2024; new instances can no longer be created[20][6]
Managed subscription (Early Access, Starter, Professional) Mozilla November 2022[5] New subscriptions disabled 1 March 2024; instances turned off 31 May 2024[22]
Hubs Community Edition Self-hosted on Kubernetes Code published 16 October 2023[21] Maintained by the Hubs Foundation; deployment scripts v2.1.1 released 8 September 2026[30]

Community Edition 2.0.0, released on 26 September 2025, was the first tagged GitHub release of the deployment scripts. It moved instance data to dynamically created persistent volumes, added backup and restore scripts and changed the Community Edition license to MPL-2.0.[31][32] Version 2.1.0, released on 12 March 2026, switched the default Nearspark and Photomnemonic container images to the foundation's own builds and added support for sending email through Swoosh.[33] Version 2.1.1 of 8 September 2026 is required to run Hubs on DigitalOcean with Kubernetes 1.34 or later. The foundation traced the failures on those versions to the container runtime's unlimited file descriptor limit, which made the HAProxy and Reticulum containers allocate far more resources than before; Reticulum's memory use rose from a couple of hundred megabytes to about 1.7 GB.[30][34] The foundation also maintains the Hubs Blender add-on, whose version 1.8.0 was released on 12 May 2026.[35]

Features

A Hubs room is a shared 3D space reached through a link. By default a room uses a "Shared link" mode in which the URL contains a random identifier; an owner can switch it to "Invite only", generate revocable invite links, promote trusted signed-in users to moderators, kick users and restrict who may create objects, draw or fly. A room holds at most 25 people, and more can watch and use text chat from the lobby; a moderator can turn on Camera Mode to broadcast their view to the lobby. Rooms can also be bound to a Discord channel so that server members join with their Discord accounts.[13]

Users appear as avatars stored as glTF 3D models, which they can customize on the website or replace with models made in 3D tools. Voice chat is spatialized, so that people near one another can talk in small groups as they would in a physical room, and text chat runs alongside it.[11][2] The in-room toolbar lets people share a desktop, webcam or phone camera; place images, videos, 3D models and GIFs from a search tool or by URL; draw in 3D with a pen; take photos and videos with a camera object; and pin objects so that they stay after their creator leaves.[36]

Spoke, the companion scene editor, runs in the browser. It builds environments from uploaded 3D models, architecture kit pieces, lights, images and videos, can pull media from Sketchfab, and publishes a scene directly to Hubs or exports it as a glTF model. Scenes can be marked as remixable so that other users can reuse them as templates.[37][11] Artists can also export scenes and objects from Blender with the Hubs Blender add-on.[35]

Architecture

The Hubs client is built with React for 2D interface components and with Three.js and A-Frame for the 3D scene. Shared state is synchronized between clients with the networked-aframe library, and physics runs only on the clients, using Ammo.js compiled to WebAssembly.[38]

The server side has several parts:

Component Role Technology
Reticulum Serves the client pages and relays all non-voice, non-video traffic (avatar transforms, sign-in links, scene updates, permission checks) between users over WebSockets and Phoenix channels Erlang/Elixir/Phoenix nodes; PostgreSQL database and file store for persistent state[38][39]
Dialog Routes voice, video and audio between participants using a selective forwarding unit (SFU) topology WebRTC server based on mediasoup; Hubs formerly used Janus[38][40]
Spoke Browser-based scene editor JavaScript[41]

The client and Reticulum repositories are licensed under the Mozilla Public License 2.0.[8][39]

Use in events, education and research

Hubs was used for virtual conferences and university classes during the COVID-19 pandemic. For IEEE VR 2020, the Mozilla Hubs team worked for two weeks on a custom installation with video co-watching, poster, demo, contest and social rooms. The IEEE Computer Society reported more than 2,000 virtual registrants, against the 800 to 900 planned for the physical event, from 58 countries.[15] In a study of that conference in Frontiers in Virtual Reality, Sun Joo (Grace) Ahn, Blair MacIntyre and colleagues reported that rooms were capped at 25 users, that 264 survey respondents (72.7%) had used Hubs, and that most of them entered through laptops or desktops even though 186 owned VR headsets. Respondents rated Hubs highest of the conference platforms for socializing and networking, and reported higher social presence in it than on Twitch (mean 4.13 against 2.68), but rated it lowest for questions to presenters.[42]

University teachers also studied it in their own courses. Alexandre Gomes de Siqueira and colleagues used Hubs to help students form project teams in the Virtual Reality for the Social Good course at the University of Florida in fall 2020. 89.5% of the students agreed or strongly agreed that it was easy to use, and the authors concluded that small, closed, highly detailed rooms encouraged interaction more than large, open, sparsely detailed ones. Two of the eight teams were formed by at least four students who had talked in groups near the project proposals they later chose.[43] Andrew Yoshimura and Christoph W. Borst held class meetings for 13 students in Hubs and compared watching lectures in a headset, watching on a desktop and presenting in a headset. Co-presence ratings were similar for headset and desktop viewing, and nine of the 13 students reported at least slight general discomfort. Asked about future classes, five students wanted an even mix of headset and desktop attendance, four mostly headset and two mostly desktop.[44]

See also

References

  1. ↑ 1.0 1.1 1.2 1.3 Sean White (2018-04-26). "Enabling Social Experiences Using Mixed Reality and the Open Web". The Mozilla Blog. Mozilla. https://blog.mozilla.org/blog/2018/04/26/enabling-social-experiences-using-mixed-reality-and-the-open-web/. Retrieved 2026-10-06.
  2. ↑ 2.0 2.1 "Welcome to Hubs". Hubs Docs. Hubs Foundation. https://docs.hubsfoundation.org/welcome.html. Retrieved 2026-10-06.
  3. ↑ Blair MacIntyre (2018-04-27). "Bespoke Social XR is getting closer, Mozilla Hubs points the way". blairmacintyre.me. https://blairmacintyre.me/2018/04/27/bespoke-social-xr/. Retrieved 2026-10-06.
  4. ↑ 4.0 4.1 Ben Lang (2020-08-12). "Mozilla is Shuttering its XR Team Amidst Major Layoff, But 'Hubs' Will Continue". Road to VR. https://roadtovr.com/mozilla-is-shuttering-its-xr-team-amidst-layoffs-but-hubs-will-continue/. Retrieved 2026-10-06.
  5. ↑ 5.0 5.1 5.2 Brian Heater (2022-11-29). "For $20 a month, you can host meetings in Mozilla's mini metaverse". TechCrunch. https://techcrunch.com/2022/11/29/for-20-a-month-you-can-host-meetings-in-mozillas-mini-metaverse. Retrieved 2026-10-06.
  6. ↑ 6.0 6.1 6.2 6.3 "End of support for Mozilla Hubs". Mozilla Support. Mozilla. https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/end-support-mozilla-hubs. Retrieved 2026-10-06.
  7. ↑ 7.0 7.1 "The Transfer". Hubs Foundation. 2024-05-31. https://hubsfoundation.org/posts/78/the-transfer/. Retrieved 2026-10-06.
  8. ↑ 8.0 8.1 "Hubs-Foundation/hubs". GitHub. https://github.com/Hubs-Foundation/hubs. Retrieved 2026-10-06.
  9. ↑ Ben Lang (2018-04-26). "Mozilla's 'Hubs' is the One-click VR Meeting Space I've Been Waiting For". Road to VR. https://www.roadtovr.com/mozillas-hubs-one-click-vr-meeting-space-ive-waiting/. Retrieved 2026-10-06.
  10. ↑ Lucas Matney (2018-04-26). "Mozilla Hubs is a super-simple social chat room for robots". TechCrunch. https://techcrunch.com/2018/04/26/mozilla-hubs-is-a-super-simple-social-chat-room-for-robots/. Retrieved 2026-10-06.
  11. ↑ 11.0 11.1 11.2 Liv Erickson (2019-09-24). "Exploring Collaboration and Communication with Mozilla Hubs". Mozilla Hacks. Mozilla. https://hacks.mozilla.org/2019/09/exploring-collaboration-and-communication-with-mozilla-hubs/. Retrieved 2026-10-06.
  12. ↑ Jill Franklin (2019-04-16). "Mozilla Announces the Hubs Discord Bot, Unity 2019.1 Now Available, Qt 5.13 Beta Is Out, Whitewater Foundry Launches Pengwin and the Valve Index VR Headset to Support Linux". Linux Journal. https://www.linuxjournal.com/content/mozilla-announces-hubs-discord-bot-unity-20191-now-available-qt-513-beta-out-whitewater. Retrieved 2026-10-06.
  13. ↑ 13.0 13.1 "Room Settings". Hubs Docs. Hubs Foundation. https://docs.hubsfoundation.org/hubs-room-settings.html. Retrieved 2026-10-06.
  14. ↑ "WeeklyUpdates/EmergingTechnology". MozillaWiki. Mozilla. https://wiki.mozilla.org/WeeklyUpdates/EmergingTechnology. Retrieved 2026-10-06.
  15. ↑ 15.0 15.1 "Case Study: IEEE VR 2020". IEEE Computer Society. https://www.computer.org/conferences/organize-a-conference/organizer-resources/hosting-a-virtual-event/success-stories/ieee-vr-2020. Retrieved 2026-10-06.
  16. ↑ 16.0 16.1 Ben Lang (2020-04-29). "Mozilla Launches 'Hubs Cloud' on AWS, the 'WordPress of Social Virtual Spaces'". Road to VR. https://roadtovr.com/mozilla-hubs-cloud-launch-wordpress-social-virtual-spaces/. Retrieved 2026-10-06.
  17. ↑ Ian Hamilton (2021-01-25). "Mozilla Announces Redesign For Hubs Web-based Social Experience". UploadVR. https://www.uploadvr.com/mozilla-hubs-redesign/. Retrieved 2026-10-06.
  18. ↑ Kyle Wiggers (2022-12-01). "Mozilla acquires Active Replica to build on its metaverse vision". TechCrunch. https://techcrunch.com/2022/12/01/mozilla-acquires-active-replica-to-build-on-its-metaverse-vision/. Retrieved 2026-10-06.
  19. ↑ "Introducing Hubs Starter Plan: Own Your Virtual World for Free". Mozilla Hubs Creator Labs. Mozilla. 2023-05-25. https://web.archive.org/web/2023/https://hubs.mozilla.com/labs/free-managed-hubs-with-the-starter-plan/. Retrieved 2026-10-06.
  20. ↑ 20.0 20.1 "Mozilla Hubs Brings Educators and Businesses One Step Closer to Democratizing Virtual Worlds". Mozilla Hubs Creator Labs. Mozilla. 2023-07-19. https://web.archive.org/web/2023/https://hubs.mozilla.com/labs/professional-plan-and-community-edition/. Retrieved 2026-10-06.
  21. ↑ 21.0 21.1 "initial commit for community edition (#318)". GitHub. 2023-10-16. https://github.com/Hubs-Foundation/hubs-cloud/commit/0d8891af0f4cb3f65d537000d0ef5e8859195cc1. Retrieved 2026-10-06.
  22. ↑ 22.0 22.1 "What you need to know about the future of Mozilla Hubs". Mozilla Hubs Creator Labs. Mozilla. 2024-02-15. https://web.archive.org/web/20240216000000/https://hubs.mozilla.com/labs/sunset/. Retrieved 2026-10-06.
  23. ↑ Ian Hamilton (2024-02-16). "Mozilla Hubs Is Shutting Down, Will Be Handed Off To The Community". UploadVR. https://www.uploadvr.com/mozilla-hubs-shutdown/. Retrieved 2026-10-06.
  24. ↑ Scott Hayden (2024-02-20). "Mozilla is Shutting Down Development on WebXR Social App 'Hubs'". Road to VR. https://roadtovr.com/mozilla-hubs-shutdown-web-xr/. Retrieved 2026-10-06.
  25. ↑ "Hubs Foundation Incorporation Announcement". Hubs Foundation. 2024-05-18. https://hubsfoundation.org/posts/76/hubs-foundation-incorporation-announcement/. Retrieved 2026-10-06.
  26. ↑ Sören Hentzschel (2024-06-01). "Mozilla Hubs wird von der Hubs Foundation weiterentwickelt". soeren-hentzschel.at. https://www.soeren-hentzschel.at/mozilla-hubs/mozilla-hubs-wird-von-der-hubs-foundation-weiterentwickelt/. Retrieved 2026-10-06.
  27. ↑ "2024 Year-end Recap and Announcements". Hubs Foundation. 2025-01-13. https://hubsfoundation.org/posts/505/2024-year-end-recap-and-announcements/. Retrieved 2026-10-06.
  28. ↑ "2025 Year-end Recap". Hubs Foundation. 2026-01-13. https://hubsfoundation.org/posts/1157/2025-year-end-recap/. Retrieved 2026-10-06.
  29. ↑ "First AGM for the Hubs Foundation". Hubs Foundation. 2025-10-11. https://hubsfoundation.org/posts/1031/first-agm-for-the-hubs-foundation/. Retrieved 2026-10-06.
  30. ↑ 30.0 30.1 "Hubs Community Edition Deployment Scripts v2.1.1 Released". Hubs Foundation. 2026-09-08. https://hubsfoundation.org/posts/1283/hubs-community-edition-deployment-scripts-v2-1-1-released/. Retrieved 2026-10-06.
  31. ↑ "Release 2.0.0 - Hubs-Foundation/hubs-cloud". GitHub. 2025-09-26. https://github.com/Hubs-Foundation/hubs-cloud/releases/tag/2.0.0. Retrieved 2026-10-06.
  32. ↑ "Hubs Community Edition Updates 2025-09-26". Hubs Foundation. 2025-09-26. https://hubsfoundation.org/posts/938/hubs-community-edition-updates-2025-09-26/. Retrieved 2026-10-06.
  33. ↑ "Release 2.1.0 - Hubs-Foundation/hubs-cloud". GitHub. 2026-03-12. https://github.com/Hubs-Foundation/hubs-cloud/releases/tag/2.1.0. Retrieved 2026-10-06.
  34. ↑ "Kubernetes 1.34+ Issues". Hubs Foundation. 2026-09-08. https://hubsfoundation.org/posts/1286/kubernetes-1-34-issues/. Retrieved 2026-10-06.
  35. ↑ 35.0 35.1 "Hubs Foundation". Hubs Foundation. https://hubsfoundation.org/. Retrieved 2026-10-06.
  36. ↑ "Hubs Features". Hubs Docs. Hubs Foundation. https://docs.hubsfoundation.org/hubs-features.html. Retrieved 2026-10-06.
  37. ↑ "Building Scenes with Spoke". Hubs Docs. Hubs Foundation. https://docs.hubsfoundation.org/intro-spoke.html. Retrieved 2026-10-06.
  38. ↑ 38.0 38.1 38.2 "System Overview". Hubs Docs. Hubs Foundation. https://docs.hubsfoundation.org/system-overview.html. Retrieved 2026-10-06.
  39. ↑ 39.0 39.1 "Hubs-Foundation/reticulum". GitHub. https://github.com/Hubs-Foundation/reticulum. Retrieved 2026-10-06.
  40. ↑ "Hubs-Foundation/dialog". GitHub. https://github.com/Hubs-Foundation/dialog. Retrieved 2026-10-06.
  41. ↑ "Hubs-Foundation/Spoke". GitHub. https://github.com/Hubs-Foundation/Spoke. Retrieved 2026-10-06.
  42. ↑ Sun Joo (Grace) Ahn, Laura Levy, Allison Eden, Andrea Stevenson Won, Blair MacIntyre, Kyle Johnsen (2021-04-07). "IEEEVR2020: Exploring the First Steps Toward Standalone Virtual Conferences". Frontiers in Virtual Reality, vol. 2, art. 648575. https://doi.org/10.3389/frvir.2021.648575. Retrieved 2026-10-06.
  43. ↑ Alexandre Gomes de Siqueira, Pedro Guillermo Feijóo-García, Jacob Stuart, Benjamin Lok (2021-04-13). "Toward Facilitating Team Formation and Communication Through Avatar Based Interaction in Desktop-Based Immersive Virtual Environments". Frontiers in Virtual Reality, vol. 2, art. 647801. https://doi.org/10.3389/frvir.2021.647801. Retrieved 2026-10-06.
  44. ↑ Andrew Yoshimura, Christoph W. Borst (2021-05-31). "A Study of Class Meetings in VR: Student Experiences of Attending Lectures and of Giving a Project Presentation". Frontiers in Virtual Reality, vol. 2, art. 648619. https://doi.org/10.3389/frvir.2021.648619. Retrieved 2026-10-06.
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