With the end of 2024, it’s time to reflect on all we accomplished in the year. What a change at the end of the year from the beginning. At the start of 2024 there was no Hubs Foundation, Hubs was still a Mozilla project, there was a team of paid employees maintaining it, and new feature development was steady. Then came the news that Mozilla was leaving and it was up to the community if Hubs would continue on. And continue on it did! The community banded together to support the Mozilla Hubs team as their work wrapped up, to create a not-for-profit corporation to make sure Hubs continued, and to do the day-to-day work that is the backbone of any successful open source project. Throughout the year we have worked to get our infrastructure up and running, to make it easy to use and further develop Hubs, and to keep Hubs, and most importantly its community, going in general.
Highs and lows from the year include:
The announcement of the shutdown. 😢
The outpouring of support for Hubs and the Mozilla Hubs team.
A St. Patrick’s Day party, put on by the Community. Group photo (avatars by Imaginer, and Hrithik via the hackweek avatar maker; scene by Heather with assets from Christian; rainbow from Imaginer; pot of gold from Sketchfab by djcarson)
The birth of the Hubs Foundation.
A Hubs tribute video garnered 247 views and was mentioned at AWE XR in a talk “Why Open Wins”.
The creation of a website for the Hubs Foundation.
A shutdown party to send off the Mozilla Hubs team in style. Left: group photo at the Hubs shutdown relay race party (avatars by Christian – hackweek avatar maker, Jim, and Manuel; scene by Imaginer; Jack Daniels bottle from Sketchfab). Right: trophy at the end of the relay race filled with Hubs ducks (scene by Imaginer).
The closing of Virtual Link Hosting (A company that offered managed hosting for Hubs and contributed significantly to Hubs’ survival). 😢
The creation of a Co-op Community Edition instance channel in the Hubs Discord to facilitate people sharing Hubs instances.
The rise of other companies offering managed hosting for Hubs.
Continued community meetups, dev meetups, and (new this year) documentation meetups. Top left: group photo (avatars by Theanine3D and Christian, scene by Christian). Top right: tiger in a sleeping bag (avatar by Theanine3D, scene by Christian, sleeping bag from Sketchfab by Joe). Bottom left: group photo (avatars from Christian, and unknown; scene from Imaginer and golem_maker613; three cute pandas from Sketchfab by Nezuko_Kawaii). Bottom right: photo from a sneak peek of Non-Player Character: A Virtual Reality Musical created by Brendan A Bradley, musical direction by Maurice Soque Jr. and technical direction by Michael Morran.
Improvements to the Hubs Discord server and the integration of volunteer specific channels to onboard and coordinate volunteers.
The reinstatement of a Community Events channel in the Hubs Discord so that people can share their own personal Hubs events.
The setup of an official instance for the Hubs Foundation for our meetings and events, and to eventually facilitate the distribution of community scenes and avatars. This is being generously donated by HrithikWins.
The reinstatement of the “Share of the Month” in the Hubs Discord.
The expansion of the moderator team for the Hubs Discord.
The creation of a docker repository on Docker Hub and the automatic docker building GitHub workflows updated to point to it, so that people can use new versions of Hubs in their Community Edition instances.
Continued development of the Hubs Blender add-on and the Hubs client.
The use of Hubs in a live musical at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival.
Video clip of Non-Player Character: A Virtual Reality Musical created by Brendan A Bradley, musical direction by Maurice Soque Jr. and technical direction by Michael Morran.
The relaunch of the Hubs Foundation’s website with a fantastic new theme by Theanine3D.
The release of roadmaps for the Hubs Foundation detailing our plans for the future.
A Halloween party, put on by the Community. Group photo of attendees at the Halloween party (avatars by Theanine3D, Imaginer, and from Google Poly; scene by Imaginer; in-room objects from Sketchfab and Jim).
The re-uploading of old avatars and scenes to the Hubs Foundation’s official Hubs instance, along with some new ones created by members of the Hubs community. Note: there’s still lots that can be uploaded and this effort will continue in 2025.
The release of improved documentation for Hubs Compose (now developers can set up a local testing instance easily).
A Holiday party, put on by the Community. “Hubs” float (left) by Urs Hunkler; “Candy Store” float (right) by Heather Dodds with assets from Christian; other floats in the background by various community members; holiday scene by Heather Dodds.
And now for some brand new announcements:
There is now an asset browser on the official Hubs Foundation instance to allow scenes and avatars to be easily imported into Community Edition instances. See the Getting Started page for instructions.
There is a new GitHub workflow to make it easy to build and push custom docker images to a docker repository of your choice. See the workflow documentation for how to use it. Note: this is currently only available for the Hubs Client repository; more repositories will follow.
Thanks to the new GitHub workflow, there is a docker image of the addons branch available for anyone to experiment with in their Community Edition instance (yes, that means you can now play with Behavior Graphs, and hopefully help fix the bugs 😛). See this Discord post for more details.
We are working on reviving the Creator Labs blog and already have a new post by PinkPolygon: Getting Started with Hubs Community Edition. More announcements about Creator Labs to follow soon!
We are working on a getting involved section to help onboard new contributors, reviewers, etc.. There’s a lot to help out with and now with some of the latest pieces of infrastructure falling into place, we’re getting really close to being able to have just about anyone jump in and help, so stay tuned for announcements of how to get involved!
Some places where things fell through:
Along with everything we accomplished, there were a few things that we had planned to do this year that for whatever reason we just couldn’t get to.
Elections. We were unable to hold elections in the fall as planned; however, they are still coming and we’ll get to them as soon as we can.
The Hubs docs. A lot of good documentation work was done this year, but we had issues re-hosting the user documentation generated from the hubs-docs repository. This is still planned and we hope to have it finished soon.
The old Creator Labs articles. These articles are full of great content and we had planned to get them back online, but for now they’re still only accessible through either the WayBack Machine or the hubs-blender-files GitHub repository. In 2025, we will work to re-host them in an archived section of the new Creator Labs blog.
Final Thoughts:
We leave you now with some thoughts on the future. Over the past year we’ve heard tell of how Hubs is dead, but hopefully, after reading this post, you can see that nothing is further from the truth. Hubs isn’t dead, it just had to retreat into the shadows while a bunch of dedicated people worked incredibly hard to make sure it comes back better than ever. As we progress into 2025, Hubs will continue to improve and reach new heights. Long live Hubs! We’ll take it from here.
Photos used in this post were taken by community members.
“Hubs” float (left) by Urs Hunkler; “Candy Store” float (right) by Heather Dodds with assets from Christian; other floats in the background by various community members; holiday scene by Heather Dodds.
