My take is that it stems from the way we chat with others online, where we might be freer with our formatting as we type out messages in IRC/Discord/wherever. It's meant to convey "down to earth"-ness or speaking plainly, which I find fitting given the content of the post.
While I always marveled at how Hubs survived the 2020 layoffs (which included the people working on WebVR/WebXR at the time), seeing it shutting down is a shame. We used it to run monthly meetups for the WebXR Discord for just about the last 3 years. Very curious what's going to happen to it now, whether it gets handed off to another entity (i.e. Firefox Reality to Igalia) or left to the community somehow.
Yes, both the Hubs client and related backend services (Reticulum, Dialog, etc) are all open source, but it's somewhat difficult to stand up manually. There's Hubs Community Edition which launched late last year that lets you spin up everything necessary in a Kubernetes cluster, which is what I've been working on getting set up on a small Hetzner VPS.
I proposed WebXR, the rejection reason they gave was they "lacked testing infrastructure." While the WPT tests are run with a mocked XR device, I can maybe understand if they figured they would have to have physical devices to test real-world performance also.
It's curious that it only supports immersive-vr and not immersive-ar XRSessions given the focus of the headset. Wonder if it has something to do with their rendering backend, maybe something about camera access or even the features of immersive-ar sessions as well?
Regardless, I'll be interested to see if this starts to promote more interest in developing hand tracking support in upcoming WebXR apps.
