Using lightning network on a day-by-day basis has became increasingly easier for bitcoiners thank to the speed of development on this brilliant protocol.

Orange pilling nocoiners is easier than ever because of solutions like Wallet of Satoshi, LightningTipBot in Telegram, Phoenix, Moon, Alby etc. These wallets give really a magic-like experience to users most of the time, for 99% of the transactions, and this is really pushing ahead the ecosystem and the development on top of Bitcoin.

After several months of self-hosted lightning payments with my node I feel that I can provide a reasonable feedback about my own experience being my own bank.
Overall the experience has been great, Zeus wallet is the perfect terminal for my node management when I'm messin' around; while at home I really enjoy Ride The Lightning. Both LND and c-lightning are good implementations, with both their pros and cons.

But here comes the troubles. I try to not connect directly with huge hubs like Acinq or WoS but I found out that is nearly impossible to have a good LN experience without having connections with those hubs. I often find myself struggling with routing errors and payments that constantly fail. Liquidity is always a huge issue if you want to try the 'decentralized' LN experience (therefore only connecting with community nodes etc).

I hear your thoughts though:

Man, if you don't connect to big nodes you'r never going to make through with +100'000 sat payments!

I'm aware of it, but in a certain sense I wish I could...I'm in love with the idea of individuals being their own bank and I hope that liquidity issues will be solved as the adoption progress.

I'm really curious about your own experience with self-hosted lightning nodes:

• Which LN implementation do you prefer?
• Have you ever experienced troubles while trying to pay with your LN node?
• What do you think about the idea of avoiding direct channels with big hubs? Is it a good idea from a 'sovreignty' standpoint?

Ps. Stacker News is brilliant!