Here I explained in more details:

Here another ones:

And many more on my substack, over 70 guides about Bitcoin and LN nodes. Your life as a node operator will be much better if you start reading them. Important is the journey of learning not the destination.

Read also:

Both rewarding and frustrating.

The frustrating:

-the sheer randomness of channel closes -channels going offline -payments getting stuck -just funding bugs that don’t get fixed quickly or at all (I found at least one in both LND and CLN) -rebalancing can be a pain and expensive -dead/zombie channels -liquidity being drained too quickly by a hog like wallet of Satoshi -node dies and you can’t troubleshoot because you are away -node corruption due to power loss (learned this the hard way bought UPS but even then it’s caused issues) -software updates that causes unforeseen issues -feeling helpless when you have node issues/troubles -nodes get deleted from mobile wallet and having to reset -tor network is so unreliable almost makes lightning unusable but is needed to protect your IP address

The rewarding:

-everytime a payment goes through the sense of euphoria that comes over you like wow this actually works -using your own capital to make and route payments -earning fees when you route (one time my node was routing v4v podcasting streams it was cool to earn those fees -selling channels for sats -making payments in bitcoin using your own node no hosted wallets!

If you are in for the long haul it’s fun to tinker and experiment but can be expensive.

Hope this helps

I guess for me the main one I didn't know was that you need to put up quite a few sats and open a bunch of channels. You can swap out & reuse those onchain TX to create new channels.

Not enough large channels might cause too many failed payments which can be frustrating.

You likely won't gain any sats by opening channels in this higher fee environment, so you'd be doing it for learning/experience or because you want to help the lightning network grow.

Also you need to be comfortable keeping funds online in a hot wallet.

Finally know that LND (umbrel) use AEZEED seeds! Not BIP39

I have used the first time by LNTXbot It works fine but unfortunately it no longer works.

I'm just interested and studying. Lighting network

The channel rebalancing is annoying (when I even care about it). Other than that... I can't complain.

You should run a lightning node. You will learn things and you will be helping.

The main challenges are managing channels for sure.

managing channels is key for an healthy and well connected node.

There are people with much more knowledge about this than I do. I will leave the answers to them.