At a time when commercial streaming platforms keep giving buyers reasons to distrust them – from rising subscription prices to deleting purchased movies from accounts – the leading free, open-source alternative, Jellyfin, is experiencing a major shakeup. All its founders have stepped down, citing burnout or changing life priorities.

Jellyfin is an open-source media server that organizes and streams owned movies, TV shows, and other media files over a network. This completely free alternative to Plex and other commercial solutions has become one of the most popular free self-hosted apps.

In less than a week, all cofounders have stepped down from the project.

Jellyfin itself started in 2018 as a fork of Emby media server, when it closed its open-source development.

“Now here we are 7-and-a-half years later, and it’s the #1 FLOSS media server, a truly viable alternative to Plex for literally millions of server administrators and probably 10x that many individual users, and we’ve left our parent project completely in our dust. We've proven that FLOSS works, and is in demand,” said a cofounder, Joshua Boniface, in a departure announcement on the Jellyfin forum.

Boniface also mentioned that Andrew Rabert, another cofounder, resigned on Friday.

Another core team member, Anthony Lavado, who spent nearly 8 years with the project, is also leaving.

This transition might significantly alter the project’s direction in the future, as it reveals inner tensions and governance failures.

Why are they stepping down?

Rabert left the project quietly, only explaining the reasoning on the GitHub issue page, titled “Rename the app.”

The developer has been working on rewriting Jellyfin’s desktop client since December 2025 due to long-standing problems, such as HDR support and maintenance issues.

However, this work was rejected by the broader community. So now it’s an unofficial desktop client for Jellyfin called “jellium-desktop.”

“There were only a handful of organization members in support of how I was developing this – including part of the leadership team. However, the general attitude was very negative and increasingly burdensome and restrictive,” Rabert said.

The cofounder lost almost all motivation to dedicate the time to the project, which was his passion and hobby, and didn’t want to throw away a large chunk of volunteered time when developing the desktop client for home theater PCs.

“There's still so, so much that I want to improve and enhance.”

Andrew Rabert

The cofounder also hinted at earlier disagreements over the use of the AI assistant Claude during project development – some members pushed back, another early sign of hostility that wore him down.

Boniface, meanwhile, states “severe burnout, and risks to my mental health” as a reason for departure.

“For me personally, it was just time for a change. I simply could no longer provide the effort (mental or time-wise) that the role demanded.”

Boniface assures that the ongoing hand-off is “amicable,” there is little to no risk of “hostile fork or anything of that nature,” and hopes the project will outlive him.

“Jellyfin will continue for a long time to come, just not with me at its head.”

Lavado mentions yet another reason – wanting to leave the project for a long time.

“My life is changing, and I've got other things that must take priority.”

AI causing burnout

There were earlier signs of disagreement in how Jellyfin is organized. In the “State of the Fin” post, released in May, the team complained about AI code causing burnout.

“Increased support requests, combined with the AI code submissions, have led to burnout at various levels of the development and admin team,” the post reads.

“Abuse from users when something isn't working or a change isn't accepted only increases the loss of motivation. This has already led to delays in client and server improvements.”

The Jellyfin shakeup follows other unfavorable trends for media consumers. Recently, the commercial alternative Plex tripled the price of Lifetime Plex Pass to $749.99, “to more accurately reflect its true value.”

Also, Sony wiped hundreds of purchased movies from user libraries, prompting them to buy physical copies instead.

Jellyfin has 1,431 contributors on GitHub. According to the project's “Constitution,” which is heavily based on the Debian document, Jellyfin is organized in a hierarchical structure, with the Project Leader at the top, followed by the Leadership Team, the Financial Committee, and other leaders and committees.

However, the leadership team document hasn’t yet been updated with the new replacements, and all three departed leaders are listed as active on the roster. No succession plan has been detailed.

It’s unclear how the leadership shake-up will affect the project’s direction. Many Hacker News contributors are expressing gratitude for the founders, praising Jellyfin for what it is now – a great product.