Unfortunately their landing page doesn’t give and real confidence. It looks like a MVP rather than something they’ve been working on for years.
edit: or wait, maybe there is content on here but you need to sign in to view any of it? if that's the case it's not very clear.
As a viewer, i have no idea what i'm supposed to do on this site.
Essentially, Floatplane is a fail over for Youtube. It's not there to replace it, it's there to supplement it and be there in case it disappear. That means that it will never be your source to discover someone, but it will be your source to subscribe to someone that you discovered somewhere else. It's closer to Patreon in that regard (though I believe they still have a bit of discoverability, but it's certainly not your source for that).
That means that most of their function will be geared toward creator, and allow them to offer something more to their viewer (but that for sure will require an account and a paid subscription). One of their interesting current feature for example is to allow streaming to multiple platform (Floatplane, Twitch and Youtube) in parallel.
I was also extremely confused looking at it - I wasn't even sure whether I was signing up as a creator or a viewer. Then I signed up and got in and was presented with nothing except a bunch of locked content. I had watched the video on the launch and still had no idea that it was a pay-per-month thing. I'm not against that at all - I just didn't know.
I'm extremely glad Floatplane exists. YouTube is changing for the worse IMHO - at least I no longer feel like I'm their target audience.
I hope the Floatplane guys are reading this and other places and taking all this feedback in. I'm really excited to watch this one; I can see the end of YouTube, at least as a viewer and I'm glad that people are starting to build and consider alternatives.
"Good looking" is far from the most important thing in a web site like this. But it is hard to argue it isn't relevant.
Once you view a stream the only things you see are the video player, details about the streamer, and chat.
Not sure what you imagine could be better, but if you want to know what really bad UI looks like, check out Mixer.
Floatplane has made a very conscious decision not to influence the user's decisions on consuming content; there's no algorithm, recommended videos, or trending page. you just have access to the videos of people you want to support.
In that sense -as others have mentioned-, it's functionality much closer to a 'Video Patreon' than it is to say, a youtube alternative (AAMOF they've explicitly mentioned that several times)
When seen through that lens, it becomes apparent that "looking good" isn't really all that relevant, I mean, would the way patreon looks prevent you from supporting your favorite creator? probably not.
PS: Of course I get that good UI/UX is a must these days, my point is that they probably have much higher priority (not to mention mission-critical) tasks on their to-do list right now.