geerlingguy
The grand ol' Floatplane experiment
Just wanted to open an issue where I can keep track of some Floatplane quirks, experiences, etc. as I've launched my Floatplane channel today: https://www.floatplane.com/channel/JeffGeerling/home
Onboarding Experience
Some people on Twitter/X had suggested I join Floatplane after my YouTube channel got a (now-rescinded) community guidelines strike from a video where I showed how to set up Jellyfin. I had some conversations with @luke_lafr, and eventually it led to an invite to join Floatplane as a creator.
I uploaded videos and familiarized myself with the creator UI for a month or so, and eventually, after working out the business/finance details with LMG's accounting, we flipped the switch to go live on Feb 20, 2025.
Why not Nebula?
I have had a number of people ask on social media why I'm on Floatplane and not Nebula.
The simple reason? I believe Nebula (like Floatplane, I guess) is invite-only for the time being, and Nebula's historically focused on docu-series, essayist, and edu-tainment creators, less on tech or other topics.
However, Dave Wiskus did ping me on Bsky, so maybe something will come of that? I don't not like Nebula, it's just I haven't seen it come up much in the tech realm (certainly even less than Floatplane... which hasn't onboarded many new creators recently in general).
Nebula Update
I had a fruitful conversation about the possibility of joining Nebula—however I had a few concerns with the features and the way the creator relationship is structured:
- It seems like the platform is against adding commenting functionality; the cited concern is the moderation required to keep in compliance with laws and such. I find comments to be one of the best aspects of publishing on YouTube (and one of the most 'sticky' things about content on YouTube—many channels have creators who will have fruitful conversations below the video, and there's even more learning to be had there than in the video itself sometimes!
- AFAICT Nebula requires creators on the platform to be exclusive to Nebula, outside of YouTube. I don't enjoy exclusivity deals, and that's one reason despite Amazon's constant offers, I never allowed my books to be nominated for Kindle deals or bundles, because that would've triggered an exclusivity clause, meaning readers on any other platform would not be able to purchase my books there! I like having the freedom to publish anywhere (even, someday, maybe, to something like PeerTube or another distributed hosting platform if that ever becomes viable).
- AFAICT (again, this is based on my preliminary discussion) the primary income most of the non-top-tier creators on Nebula gets is through affiliate marketing—you get a portion of revenue for every Nebula subscriber who subscribes with your link/code. I am a bit allergic to affiliate marketing, and again, AFAICT, unless you're pulling in massive watch time on Nebula, that would be the majority of any possible revenue from the service, compared to the smaller share you get from Nebula's userbase.
I throw no shade on any creator who chooses to go with Nebula either, and I'm not saying I'll never be on that platform... but the lack of comments and the exclusivity clause especially are a bit of a turn-off :(
Floatplane Quirks and Questions
There doesn't seem to be any way to upload subtitles (After uploading a video attachment, you can edit it, add a language, then upload an SRT there..srt), or any subtitling/CC capabilities at all; many YT viewers (something like 30%) have CC enabled on my videos, as I spend a good bit of time prepping good English subtitles.- I can't seem to find any creator analytics (even just a view count, or views per video, outside of scrolling through the video list)
- I can't seem to find a listing of all comments on my videos (useful if I want to check for any comments to which I'd like to reply)
- There's no real discovery mechanism. Not that you need an in-your-face algorithm, but maybe on the home page, or somewhere on the watch page, it would be nice to have either a straight feed of 'all videos on the platform', or at the very least a 'FYP' or 'Discover' feed, which uses simple matching like what you get with Apache Solr or something (see the Further Reading block on my blog for an example just based on title, body, and tag similarity).
AFAICT there's no search functionality. Even if it were a listing of all videos you have access to, searching by keyword in the title (something you can implement with just a DB query), that would be better than nothing.There's no sitewide search, but there is a search option on each creator landing page.
Regarding CC—Luke mentioned there is functionality, but it seems like it's currently not exposed in the 'Creator CMS' area, so there's no way to upload captions right now. Hopefully that's not too hard to get enabled! Right now looking at some LTT videos and my own, there are no CC options in the player, but that might just be waiting for an SRT to be available?
Regarding search, there is a search box on the channel-level (not sitewide):
The search button is hidden behind the little > arrow, probably something that was added for mobile design but needs to be hidden away on desktop or when the viewport is wide enough.
Just say the YT video, and I'm happy to see you're on Floatplane - subscribed, already. You've given me a lot of helpful videos, so happy to return the favor :)
Regarding CC—Luke mentioned there is functionality, but it seems like it's currently not exposed in the 'Creator CMS' area, so there's no way to upload captions right now. Hopefully that's not too hard to get enabled! Right now looking at some LTT videos and my own, there are no CC options in the player, but that might just be waiting for an SRT to be available?
If you've got access to LTT's FP Exclusive videos they have CC options in the player now, and have done for a little while, so I suspect they're testing it there. Before that being available the Exclusives uploaded 2 videos to each 'post' one with burned captions and one without (not a perfect solution by any means)
@TheDevFreak Good to know! Sounds like they probably just haven't accelerated the timeline on getting the feature out for all creators.
Honestly most content creators still don't seem to consider CC/subtitling as an essential part of the edit/metadata/upload process. I think they should, but I also have my own experiences with (temporary) vision impairment, as well as experience with ADA laws and website accessibility, so that probably makes me more sensitive to it...
I didn't see a discord link and not sure how to find it. I connected by discord account After subscribing. Floatplane account: Zealot
@AEW2015 - It seems like the Discord integration is not quite working. I might've misconfigured it, will look into that!
Hey @geerlingguy ,
You should be able to add subtitles to your video right now if you so choose, here is how you can achieve this.
-
Go to one of your uploaded post with a video, or create a new post.
-
Click on the "Edit" button for the video you want to add a caption file.
- 1 - Select the language for your caption 2 - Click on "Add Language"
- 1 - Click on "Choose File" and select your SRT, SBT or VTT file. 2 - Click "Save"
Feel free to let me know if that doesn't work!
@geerlingguy You mentioned accessibility in your blog post. If you have any way to ping Luke or someone else in charge of the iOS app, please let them know that the app has some accessibility problems. The big one is the inability to pause videos without the use of a remote (such as headphone controls), and while a video is not paused, there's no way to close it.
- Play a Floatplane video, then enable VoiceOver. The top of the screen, where the playback/close controls should be, is blank to VO.
- Perform a magic tap (two-finger double tap). Normally, this should pause whatever media is playing. It does not do so for Floatplane.
- Connect headphones with playback controls and use them to pause the video. Only now do the play and close buttons appear, even if they lack accessibility labels.
In short, once a video is playing, the only ways to pause it are to go to the home screen or use headphone controls. The only ways to close it are to kill the app or, again, use headphone controls.
The app has some other bugs, including a pretty serious one in the sign-in flow where VoiceOver can't review what the user has typed, nor can braille screen input be used. But for day-to-day use, this is the worst one. I've emailed Floatplane support, as has another VoiceOver user. We've gotten no response. I've also mentioned this in a comment on a Floatplane thread in the LTT subreddit.
Sorry to hijack your issue for what may be unrelated problems, but I'm not sure how else to get these problems to the attention of the team that can fix them. I realize VoiceOver users are likely a tiny fraction of Floatplane's user base, but it's still not cool to have an app with such usability problems.
@Maelstrom96 oh indeed I see that! I'll upload my captions later when I'm back at the computer. Thanks!
Also, at least one person was able to get the Discord connected through Floatplane, so I'll keep digging on that and see if it might be a separate user error, or something that's not obvious from the end user perspective.
I reconnected my Discord, but see nothing. Is there an email with a invite link or something?
Regarding search, there is a search box on the channel-level (not sitewide):
The search button is hidden behind the little
>arrow, probably something that was added for mobile design but needs to be hidden away on desktop or when the viewport is wide enough.
On my desktop view of the page it shows as a magnifying glass the whole time - there text box isn't there until you click that - but it is at least obvious that its a search option. Is this hidden as the channel owner rather than a mobile feature?
There are many options for filtering when you click on the filter icon after clicking the search icon...
Not so much an issue, but struck me as odd that this issues list was here, rather than somewhere managed by LTT. A quick search suggests some have raised issues or feature requests on the LTT forums, but the official way would be contacting support. I guess this thread is more about @geerlingguy on floatplane, rather than floatplane itself, although there is obviously a lot of overlap.
It would be great to see the issues and/or feature requests publicly, or maybe even a roadmap. Something like https://feedback.gitkraken.com/. I'm aware having that public comes with many downsides though.
I have all the captions added for all the videos currently on my Floatplane channel, yay!
I reconnected my Discord, but see nothing. Is there an email with a invite link or something?
@AEW2015 - I just double-checked the settings in Floatplane, and it seems like it should grant access through there. Here's how I have the plans set up, to automatically add to Discord and assign the Floatplane Supporter role:
Can you check your Floatplane settings and screenshot what you have set for the Discord integration in your profile there? Here's what mine looks like:
NOTE: I had to re-connect my Discord role (I tried the little refresh button first), in order to get Floatplane supporter to show up on my Discord profile.
I have just disconnected and reconnected my discord account... Normally there is an invite link to join the server and I haven't seen that published. Does FP push the invite to my discord account ? So you don't have to share the link ?
You can share the link and if people don't have access to channels they won't be able to access anything if they haven't subbed to your FP channel.
@RamblingGeekUK - It should allow directly adding you if you have your Discord account connected to Floatplane:
Yeah, I had it connected for LTT, disconnected and reconnected nothing happens with Discord regarding your channels.
I've never seen joining to a discord server without an invite link before.
@RamblingGeekUK - Shucks! I might figure out how to get a link... I've only had Discord connected to Patreon and YouTube this way.
I'm a bit of a Discord noob though. I found an 'Invite' button on my server, here's a link, does this work? https://discord.gg/S9FE3U8t
@geerlingguy yey! Straight in. 👍 thanks.
I thought you would have roles for FP, YT, Patreon... those who had paid would be allowed to see the full server, if you haven't paid then you don't get full access to the server 👍
Hello! Glad to see you over on our side of the internet! I'm the Floatplane front-end developer. The search button being behind the arrow is a Safari-specific (also some mobile contexts) issue that came from our recent redesign of that page. It's known and a fix will be coming soon!
@Jadeon-FPM - Thanks!
I noticed in mobile Safari on my phone, it's narrow enough the little arrow is more functional, and gets out of the way correctly, so seems like just a bug on the desktop/wider Safari layouts. Anyway, always fun targeting 20+ browser + device combos.
Something I think could make Floatplane as a platform a little more sticky—especially if it wants to expand in reach a little beyond 'LTT + some others'—would be at minimum a 'Discovery' / 'For You' page, or maybe a feed of all videos that is visible from the home page somewhere.
Added a bullet point up at the top:
There's no real discovery mechanism. Not that you need an in-your-face algorithm, but maybe on the home page, or somewhere on the watch page, it would be nice to have either a straight feed of 'all videos on the platform', or at the very least a 'FYP' or 'Discover' feed, which uses simple matching like what you get with Apache Solr or something (see the Further Reading block on my blog for an example just based on title, body, and tag similarity).
This isn't something that'd be a deal-breaker, really... but IMO if Floatplane wants more sticking power, it would be nice to cross-promote other creators' content somehow. It is a little complicated in that you'd need to subscribe for each other creator's content, so maybe it would be a disincentive. But it'd be something to look into nonetheless.
[Nebula doesn't plant to add comments,] the cited concern is the moderation required to keep in compliance with laws and such
Just wanted to say that, at least in the US, they are protected against such things for the same reason they don't need to manually review every video uploaded. The reason YouTube (and every social media website, and even GitHub) can even exist are these laws that protect them from the responsibility of active moderation, where they only need to take action if they are notified of an issue.
That said, I am oversimplifying. Other countries have similar laws, some don't, and it is more complex than this. Though, I imagine Nebula wants to be seen more like a Netflix than a Youtube.
[On Floatplane,] I can't seem to find a listing of all comments on my videos (useful if I want to check for any comments to which I'd like to reply)
Related - on the User side, you can see a list of all your activity (just comments, it seems) at /user/profile/USERNAME/activity. Unfortunately, this only contains the comment itself. I think showing the comment (with votes) and the reply tree would be quite nice. I imagine the implementation of both of these would be very similar, possibly just fetching different database entries.
Personally though, I find FloatPlane's biggest weakness right now to be Live Streams. For the client side:
- Chat: Luke mentioned to Linus on WAN that the issue with the chat frequently disconnecting (and failing to reconnect) probably won't be fixed any time soon. For savvy users who open the popout in it's own tab (
/channel/CHANNELNAME/livechat), which lets users refresh just the chat. Anyone who doesn't use this (including navigating to the popout chat normally), will be forced to refresh the entire stream. Personally, I would like to be able to connect from a chat client like Pidgin // libpurple. - Video: Floatplane doesn't currently have "DVR" like YouTube does. If you tune in late, you will need to wait for the VoD to process to see what you missed. If anything interrupts the stream on your end (pauses, connection issues, etc.), the most you will see is the the buffer they keep, but you won't be able to rewind at all. Given the limited resources, it is understandable, but is annoying due to the next issue.
- Pausing: When pausing live streams, clicking play again within a few seconds will cause it to buffer endlessly instead of picking up again. If you wait it works fine. This is annoying, particularly if you accidentally tap your ear buds (or they have auto-pause).
- Background play: On the Android app, streams won't always play in the background. Depending on how you have the stream open, the app will allow the phone to fall asleep and pause the stream. If someone wants to listen to a stream while driving, this issue could distract them. An Audio mode might be good for this. Probably an issue with usage of Android Media API.
- App PiP: On the Android app, PiP downscales the video to about 1/4 the size for the PiP window. If you exit PiP, this sizing does not always restore to the full viewing area, so you end up with a small video in the top-left corner of a player. I believe this also happens with videos, not just live streams.
- Emotes: I am guessing this is because some emotes are exclusive, but people get them slowly. ie, when a new emote is added, it takes a few days for everyone to get it. My guess is that the emote id needs to be added to a list of allowed emotes for each user. One way to solve this would be to assign emotes to roles (groups, like discord) instead. Users can be assigned to internal roles (such as "LTX 20xx", "everyone", "staff"). Instead of emotes being added to every user, they are added to the role's allowed emotes. Adding emotes then applies to everyone in a role, at once. Adding roles isn't likely to be needed as often, and rarely would need to be applied to many users at once. Role changes would include events, plan changes (including subscribing to a channel), along with misc. things.
Something I think could make Floatplane as a platform a little more sticky—especially if it wants to expand in reach a little beyond 'LTT + some others'—would be at minimum a 'Discovery' / 'For You' page, or maybe a feed of all videos that is visible from the home page somewhere.
I fully agree with the discovery feature. I gave Floatplane a try after seeing Self-hosting your own media considered harmful on Hacker News and was disappointed by how hard it was to find basically anything.
I know the YouTube algorithm is controversial but looking through my tech subscriptions, I'm pretty sure I found all of them via The Algorithm: LTT, Technology Connections, Internet of Bugs, Fireship, Alberta Tech, Practical Engineering, theprimeagen, Low Level Learning, and more.
It would also be nice if there was a "free tier" to let newcomers discover new content without immediately getting paywalled. The problem with combining discovery with paywalls, as you said:
It is a little complicated in that you'd need to subscribe for each other creator's content, so maybe it would be a disincentive.
...is there's almost a zero-sum game going on if viewers have a fixed subscription budget.
