I have finally transferred ownership of asbplayer to its own GitHub org. The org is owned by me, so functionally there isn’t much of a difference. But for me, the transfer still carries great significance.

asbplayer does not have mainstream popularity - it serves a very specific niche of language learners. It isn’t even very high quality software - although it manages complexity well enough to be successfully maintained and grown by the community. But of all the things I’ve built, it is my most original, the most genuinely value-generating, and the most collaborative.

It started out as a whimsical R&D project to develop a sentence mining tool for myself. After a while, it became software used by thousands of people, where I was the chief maintainer. Today, the majority of contributions no longer come from me. But this has just given me another kind of joy - the joy of collaborating with like-minded people to build something because we feel like it, when we feel like it. And how rare is that, in a world that loves money, deadlines, and AI slop.

So while removing my username from the frontpage of the repo does feel a little painful, it also feels like the right thing to do. Perhaps this is how a parent feels when they see their child walk on their own feet for the first time.