On My Resignation as Jellyfin Project Leader

For those who might not know yet, on Sunday, July 19th, I decided to resign as leader of the Jellyfin project and hand over this duty to a new leader. The process outlined in the project’s constitution is now proceeding, and a new leader will be chosen soon; I have no input on the matter, by design.

I wanted to write this post to outline a few of my thoughts, especially in the face of a lot of speculation. My initial announcement was relatively terse, especially my initial post on Reddit which was coppied verbatim into our forum’s announcements channel:

I’ve seen a few articles written on the subject, mostly rehasing my comment in too many words, and this evening I saw the video from Alex at KTZ Systems about it (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6lZJXmB3x20). I do want to thank Alex for the comprehensive rundown of the situation in an unbiased and non-speculative way. It’s greatly appreciated, and I am sad we never did get to collaborate on a video, but c’est la vie! On that video was this comment, from @lifefromscratch2818:

I think what often happens with these situations is it gets over dramatized. The types of people who are really good at starting projects and growing them are not always the people who are really good at guiding a large and stable project. I think it’s very possible that the underlying factor isn’t some big drama, just that the people who started and grew something just aren’t excited by running something big and stable and this surfaces as “burn out” and things which are in reality small friction points are just the straw breaking the camel’s back.

This really does hit the nail on the head. I said this in another relatively obscure Reddit comment, but basically, my personality is not the sort of personality really suited to running a large project, like Jellyfin has become.

I want to expand on that a bit further here than I have elsewhere so far, especially with another few days to really think about it. My terse initial post led to a lot of speculation about what “really” went down, and as much as I love a bit of juicy FLOSS drama, that’s not what happened here.

Jellyfin was always an experiment for me; it was the first time I had gone through with my “I could do this and do it better” (i.e. fork another project) ideas, something I had thought about many times before and since. I took the reigns of the burgeoning discussions about a fork, and over 7-and-a-half years (8 since those first rumblings) drove it into a massive project. I’m immensely proud of what we accomplished, but, an experiment can only last so long before the results come in, and for me, the results were in.

It was indeed just the small things building up over time. I’m not a good people manager, and that is a lot of what the job of “project leader” involved. Not in the “drama” sense; in the day-to-day managerial decisions sense. I don’t like telling people “no”, or making decisions that affect other people (“this gets priority”, “do this not that”, writing policy and trying to enforce it, etc.), or being a moderator in the inevitable interpersonal disputes that arise when people come together. I also took users’ comments too personally, especially the bad; I was the public face of the project, for better or worse, with my name on every release. I’ll fully admit, I’m a people pleaser and I want people to like me, and it’s very hard on me when I feel like people don’t, such as after making a hard decision in a dispute or putting my name on a release with a lot of regressions that made people upset.

I had to do those things for a long time, and as the project grew, both in users and contributors, especially over the last 3-4 years and 2-3 waves of “Plexfugees”, I had to do them more and more frequently. I used the term burnout in my announcement, and it’s real in that sense. I am just am not the kind of person who can do things in conflict with my natural personality indefinitely, and it was taking a major toll on me and my general and mental health. This wasn’t new either; this has been brewing for at least the last 2 years, possibly even dating back to 2021, slowly building as more and more things piled up. I tried being an official team lead once for a few months at a previous job, and I did not enjoy it; being the “team lead” of a major FLOSS project ultimately felt the same. I held on as long as I could, but eventually, I could not hold on any longer.

A few people, in various places, have suggested the ongoing “LLM conflicts” (if we can call them that) as a source of this, and that is, in some sense, true. A technological change as fundamental as LLMs, and its place in this project, is something which nearly everyone, both inside and outside the project, has strong opinions about. And trying to moderate discussions about that and choose a path for the project that everyone could agree to was very hard. But this was not the sole, or even the main, reason for my departure at this time. It was just another straw on the proverbial camel’s back. It would’ve been something else if not that. What this issue surfaced, however, was how little motivation I truly had left to put into it. And Jellyfin deserves a leader who has passion for the project and motivation to drive it forward.

I’ve also found myself having less and less time that I wanted to devote to Jellyfin instead of my other personal projects. I’ve got a lot on the go, and I always have. I’m working on a major DIY E-Bike project (that I will document here in an upcoming post, stay tuned!), I’ve got music I’ve written that I want to record, a lot of work I want to do to modernize my homelab, plus a number of other past projects that have stalled and need completing (a mini living moss wall project, finalizing my Supersensor project, spinning a V2 of my PWM fan controller, and more). And of course, my (no longer “new”!) job is both stressful and busy, which leaves less time during the week for other persuits. There are only so many hours in each day, and I desired more time to persue these other things going forward.

So, as I say in that original post, “I simply could no longer provide the effort (mental or time-wise) that the role demanded, and thus I was not performing my duties to an acceptable degree”, and I decided that now was the time for me to step aside and let someone else take the reigns.

I want to stress something important here, borne out of Jellyfin’s project structure: this is NOT a case of “lead developer leaves”. I barely wrote any code even early on, and was always more of a “philosophical guide”, “visionary” (think, though I detest the comparison personally, Steve Jobs), and people manager. This was something that was actually very unique to our project in comparison to just about every other FLOSS project; the vast majority are run and led by the #1 code contributor, usually the originator or someone who took up that role after a fork, but we were not. At least not up until now.

The same people who have actually been doing the work for the last several years are still with the project, including the remaining Core team and many many others who’s names would fill a full paragraph, and they are the ones now working on deciding on how it will be led going forward. Not only are they the real drivers of Jellyfin, but I trust these folks with the philosophy and goals of the project, and believe they will continue to do good work under the Jellyfin name, keeping things FLOSS and non-monetized, and guiding the project down the same path it was always heading. “New boss, same as the old boss”, but in a good way.

Things are still in flux internally (the aforementioned process takes time, especialy with such a geographically-diverse and time-constrained volunteer group), but things are still moving forward. RC3 landed last night, and the 12.0 release is still proceeding. Handoff is going well. And, after further discussions, I’m still going to be managing the project’s infrastructure (servers, etc.) for the forseeable future - my homelab heart created some very bespoke solutions that can be hard even for me to understand, and this is something I still have a great deal of passion for - but the leadership role will pass to others in the team based on that process, and the results will be announced by the project when they are ready.

Jellyfin is not going away, nor is it changing direction away from its true-FLOSS roots. No need to move back to Plex (or Emby), especially if Jellyfin is working for you! And I do believe the projet will continue to grow and mature from here into the best possible solution for anyone wishing to stream their media. I can’t and won’t speculate on the future, but I’m optimistic, not pessimistic.

I hope that helps clarify a bit more and remove a bit more of the speculation. Thank you for reading.