John Shaughnessy

2017-2023 / Mozilla

Mozilla Hubs

Mozilla Hubs was an open-source social 3D platform for browser and VR rooms, with avatars, WebRTC voice and video, WebGL/WebXR graphics, backend services, persistence, and Hubs Cloud/self-hosted deployments.

A bright low-poly Hubs community fair scene with tents, signs, trees, and avatars.
The Hubs Foundation homepage shows the community-maintained Hubs project.Source: Hubs Foundation

What It Was

Rooms you could send as links

Hubs let people create a shared 3D room, invite others with a URL, talk, look around, and share media. It ran in the browser across desktop, mobile, and headsets, so the first interaction was opening a link rather than installing an app.

Greg Fodor's planning documents described Hubs and Spoke as browser-based tools for addressable mixed-media spaces, avatar-based communication, scene creation, open-source code, and servers that communities could run for themselves.

Presence

Avatars, low-latency voice, spatial audio, body direction, and room-scale context supported real-time conversation in shared rooms.

Media

Images, videos, PDFs, 3D models, webcams, screen shares, and links could become shared objects inside a room.

Creation

Spoke gave people a browser-based editor for composing scenes, remixing rooms, and publishing environments.

Autonomy

Hubs Cloud pushed the project toward self-hosting, custom domains, custom branding, and independent operators.

Product Direction

Shared 3D spaces on the web

The project emphasized small, linkable, user-created spaces rather than one centralized virtual world. Rooms could be created quickly, shared by URL, customized with scenes and media, and used for classes, meetings, galleries, events, or informal gatherings.

The project had to support both casual room creation and deeper customization through self-hosting, client changes, custom branding, and independent operation.

Early Hubs room with avatars standing around a small low-poly house.
The early Hubs launch flow: enter a room from a browser link.Source: Mozilla blog
Hubs avatars around a whiteboard in a shared 3D meeting room.
A Hubs room with avatars, spatial voice, a whiteboard, and shared tools.Source: Mozilla Hacks
A Mozilla Hubs virtual art gallery with framed artwork on dark walls.
Creators used Hubs for galleries, classrooms, meetups, exhibitions, and events.Source: Mozilla blog

My Work

Engineering and management

I worked on Hubs from 2017 to 2023, first as a staff software engineer and later as senior engineering manager. I managed a 12-person team of software engineers and technical artists, led hiring, onboarding, technical planning, releases, incident response, and security audits, and continued writing production code.

On the engineering side, I wrote the Hubs game networking layer for state replication, authority/ownership, presence, permissions, physics sync, media sync, and plugin-oriented extensibility. I also worked across avatars, animation, identity/auth, WebRTC voice/video, WebGL/WebXR rendering, the Elixir/Phoenix backend, Hubs Cloud, AWS, and GCP.

After Mozilla

Hubs Foundation

Mozilla ended support for Hubs on May 31, 2024. The codebase is now maintained by the Hubs Foundation.

Sources

Gallery

A loose collection of rooms, tools, tutorials, experiments, and public examples from Mozilla blog posts, early feature updates, and the Hubs documentation archive.

Media preview

Class lecture

Hubs Foundation

A Hubs classroom scene with avatars, a projected slide, and shared context.

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