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The lightning network constantly changes, which makes it hard to give general recommendations for running a node.
I think the most important aspect is that you should define a realistic goal. This could be "earn more sats in fees than I have to spend onchain" (which ignores the hot-wallet risk, server cost, or the value of one's time). Another aspect could be "I'm happy as long as I understand what's going on and learn new things on a daily basis" or "I need something to tinker with". These goals aren't easy to reach, but anything more than that takes a serious amount of dedication (and skills and capital). For me, it was a combination of those, with lots of tooling (think rebalance-lnd, lnd-manageJ), some research-y stuff like Pickhardt Payments, and lots of feerate tweaking.
You should keep in mind that running a node is no push-a-button-and-forget-about-it thing. You'd need to spend time with the node on an almost daily basis for a long time until you get things right and automated. You'll make mistakes, suffer from bugs and high fee waves, and most likely you'll get very little in return. If you enjoy creating something (abstract), or even just understanding how something works, that's very helpful to stay motivated.
Capital wise, I'd say roughly 5 BTC are necessary to provide node that gets used by others. The more, the better. I'm aware that this is quite a bit in fiat terms, but that's just how it is.
I don't know of any "successors", nor do I plan to create one myself. There are other hobby nodes, though. I even consider lnbig to be a hobby project, even though with quite a lot of capital involved :)
I had Kraken disallowing me from depositing via Lightning Network, despite having a direct channel with them (with active usage). Something about European legislation. Bah.
This shows me an "unlock wallets" button ("your passphrase is required"). I don't have a passphrase, and I don't think I created a wallet in stacker.news.
Hi, I don't think my website is offline. The liquidity decrease is due to peers closing channels, after lots of activity. It's part of the game.
If you open a channel with "push amt", you basically donate these sats to your peer. From my perspective this appeared as a new channel with some sats already on my side (and in my posession from that point on). It's an easy, yet very expensive, way to create a balanced channel :)
Collaborative is the default, meaning that both nodes talk to each other and agree on how the close transaction should look like. For this they have to agree on a fee rate (which sometimes caused issues, but rarely is an issue nowadays), and of course both nodes check that the aren't ripped off. This, however, only works if both nodes are online (and agree, as described above). If anything goes wrong, one can always issue a unilateral close, often called "force close". In this variant it's a bit more expensive (the transaction is more complex), and you'd need to wait up to 14 days to get access to your share of the channel's funds (minus some fees).