Thoughts, Questions and Future of FloatPlane

[Jdorth]

Yep this is my first post .Take that as you will

 

I simply wanted to tackle some points and present some purely personal points as well as some objective points after hearing luke's code for us video 

For sake of simplicity ,ease of reading and my OCD ill segment it into parts and for lazy guys TLDR is available .

 

1. Social Platform : No luke we are not taking over the galaxy .But sure as hell are we not bending over forwards to platform masters as well. However to discuss social platform model broadly as you put it ofcourse they want a bigger userbase .Is floatplane gonna be any different? if yes any rough ideas how? if not well ..then duh . As a gross simplification you can put it like this .If you break down social platform into virtual lands that allow 'us internet guys ' to interact ,share ,have fun .Then who pays for that land and how? Because as some 90s kids like me learnt the hardway just because something says it free doesnt mean it will be free ( old me looking at young me and going like dont create that gmail account google gonna read your mails ).Which brings me down to he second point /suggestion
2. ALL ABOUT THAT SERVER : No matter what happens it ultimately comes downs to this .How will floatplane manage server space? we already know you guys upload higher quality than youtube which comes at a file size cost or server space cost .What if kyle or jayztwocents or austin evans ask u to host their channel .Ofcourse you guys would .But what if some joe nobody who wants to create a channel .Well you could either turn him away (against your business model) or let him use up server space for lesser views or advertisements .
   • Now a suggestion would be to allow /teach people to host their own servers which can be channeled through floatplane .As in the creator takes care to just keep his/her server running like a FTP upload box .So when some viewer accesses it through floatplane all your server does is access their videos and display it .Well you save server space but you end  up having to make the creator have a little more investment in creating a channel .This solves two major issues .First server space is saved .Second by ensuring that the creator has a small financial barrier of entry as well as an maintenance cost only serious content creators get in not any guy with his first video being filmed by his mom ( Luke reference ) .Also depending how open you want your platform you can set QC standards
   • Next for people who think then why the f* does floatplane exist .People could just directly showcase from their own server. For clarification what i mean is joe somebody keeps hard drives .Luke Vader and team make the magnificent tools and premiums front end and gold plated web design swoop in and  provide tools that make it easy for joe to simply copy paste video on hardrive and Luke Vader does things like suggest sponsor spot related to content or let them add sponsor spot ,automatically add to floatplane available to view list , make cat filter on top video , etc etc .In short youtube but the video is stored on creator side so that the creator has more control.
3. Talking money: Right now every platform has the rights over how they advertise or they have a pay to view service .How will floatplane be any different?  I kinda like how linus treats his sponsers .Where he  mostly spnonsers shit he knows is good and is relevant to him .(Astro headphone guys nowhere in sight anymore ) But at the same time instead of content creators looking for sponsers /advertisers desperately is it possible for advertisers to bid for content creator space? Like for example lets say Austin makes 500k  Views per video .while joe makes 1k .So someone like corsair can bid for Austin time .Highest bidders get placed in most viewed ads while lowest bidders gets placed on Joe channel .This makes joe wanna make better content while austin needs to keep views up .This solves a key problem in youtube .The random ad,creator,viewer disconnect .So ad guys know exactly who is watched more often or what content is liked/viewed more often .Also high paying guys like corsair dont end up having ads on some guy who says MSI motherboards are shit coz they are black .
4. Coding La La Land: Okay to go by what Luke is saying .You guys want a  full stack software developer who is agile (meaning who can easily switch groups) who also has professional software background and has coding knowledge of Nodejs,javascript and Web socket. Okay im not trashing on luke but what i wanna say is that you are looking for a group that hovers in between ' I ONLY KNOW THIS SO I ONLY DO THIS AND IM GREAT AT IT professionally  SO DONT ASK ME TO DO ANYTHING ELSE ' and 'HECK YA GIVE ME ANYTHING STACK OVERFLOW RULES BRUH'. I dont want to offend people who specialize in something or people who use stack overflow regularly . At least the message i got is that you want somone who can code anything but at the same time be professionally employed/spent time in some field? Any clarification would be nice because that would really explain the next thing about philosophy 
5. LMG Philosophy : LMG has always been a passionate group of people .But most importantly they keep doing new things or always explore possibilities of doing new things .In other words they were never good at something before hand but more like become good at it simply coz they wanna find out how to do shit .So why is floatplane like this under wraps construction thing? I get that there is a big peanut gallery audience that u guys entertain but that shouldnt stop the community from seeing how things are going on.

• The front end approach for example .No alfa testers? no form for feeedback? anything? 
• Discussing current ideas on table on how floatplane would be monetized? 
• Discussing if there will be ad based floaplane? 
• Heck discussing anything like maybe making the code open source so iT can be audited by public (LMG if anyone in your group thought that well showing the code makes the content vulnerable then yeah maybe lil more internet and less of cooking

Why are these thoughts important .Lets say you are a coder .Learning new skill sets takes a little time and little more effort .Its possible and easy but knowing the future of the investment you put actually might help make better choices .Heck Lmg could actually make it a little like a summer code challenge where people can actually learn new skills and LMG could get a shiny new service

But then again who knows im just a lurker on the internet 

Positive corrections are always welcome and i hope LMG replies 

TLDR ; LMG should be less cryptic about floatplane or else explain why they are in the first place? 

[DJKoston]

I honestly want to know what Is going on with the floatplane, I'm not paying until I know there is going to be a good string of content, my friend who has it, says there isn't much going on it, and I'm looking at paying the yearly fee. Is it worth it yet? I don't think so, Linus needs to put move videos on @nicklmg what is going on with Floatplane????

[Sniperfox47]

On 2017-4-21 at 2:24 PM, Jdorth said:

~snip~

Umm pretty sure that between WAN shows, the FPC announcement thread, and the FPC hiring video most of this has been announced already.

 

Floatplane club is going to be a framework for developers, not a cookie cutter templated service like YouTube. It's designed to give developers the freedom to engage *their* audience how *they* want.

 

As far as they've said it doesn't seem to be a social platform in itself in any way, instead it's a framework which content creators can implement their own social platform on, with a minimalistic layout for the platform itself in order to reduce noise. Content creators are going to be free to set things up however they want within their space.

 

 

With regards to the server I can only imagine it's going to be centrally organized by LMG. I can't imagine they'd encourage third parties to integrate third parties servers which might not hold up to their quality expectations. Also keep in mind this isn't a free open platform. At least initially, content partners are going to be by invitation only. Period.

 

 

Again on the aspect of developer freedom I doubt LMG has any intent on becoming an ad service. I may be wrong but that's an even bigger task to chew off. I imagine that developers will be free to bring over their usual sponsors. Also keeping in mind that the Floatplane club service is a paid service. The dependency on ad monotization on it will likely be lower. In fact currently LTT's Floatplane club videos don't even have the ads in them.

 

The idea is to get a coding team who can build the whole stack. They never said it was a single person. They already have a team working on it, and this new person would be integrating with that team.

 

Umm... It's not really under wraps... It's been running for several months now... The reason they don't release information on their backend is because of the whole idea of security through obfuscuity and because if they released info on how everything was set up some troll would totally DDoS them. As for Alpha testing what do you think the Floatplane club button on the forum is for? Or the forum catagory where all the videos are hosted? This is them testing everything and getting it ready. A dedicated web service takes time. They've already said that when it's ready they're going to be looking for community members to test it...

[nicklmg]

Sniperfox put it pretty well so I'll just add a few points here...

 

1. No one ever said that the goal of FPC was to maximize users at all costs. I think we actually said that that WASN'T the goal in Luke's hiring video.

2. No one ever said that FPC was going to be free. We've been operating and updating a pre-alpha version of the service here on the forum since November of last year, and it's operating on a subscription model.

3. No one ever said we were only hiring one person. As with most, if not all, job postings we presented a wishlist and will find the best candidate (or candidates) based on that set of requirements.

 

 

The site itself is still under wraps because it's not ready to be shown. When we're ready to show the community how the whole thing operates, we'll show it. Until then we're asking for some patience  

"Good things come to those who wait..."

[CA8OOS3]

@nicklmg 

 

I really enjoy the way FPC is going. I love seeing the daily content without having to deal with youtube ads in the middle of the video. The concept is nice and i look forward to seeing how much it grows. I cannot wait to see the new FPC. Keep up the great work.