What tools can be used to automate this work?

Why not use LNDg to automate it.

Yeah its not easy to do. I used to try and rebalace all the time but gave up and just left it with dynamic fees. It works okish but my channels are far from balanced.

Someone please train an AI to do it

Agreed. It can be a chore especially when you're a merchant.

This is why I just use custodial lightning solutions. Let that be someone else’s problem. Unpopular, but I don’t believe custodial spending wallets are as haram as everyone believes they are.

For maybe a few weeks I thought I'd try and build a routing node, but that did not last very long. Better to leave that to the pros imo. Just create a few liquidity swaps on #[2] and a fat channel to a vendor you pay a lot, and be done with it.

Looking forward to this being far more automated and the UI flow being that much smoother. One day: Deposit bitcoin on a node, then the node does the rest. Instant self-hosted lightning liquidity.

You could try Torq, you can manage your channels, do rebalancing and more https://github.com/lncapital/torq

Indeed, I've done all of that too and stopped. Reballancing channels is a pain in the ass. Also when BOLT12 on LND?

True. I admit I've been running both a full bitcoin node and a lightning node for some years now. But I've never setup channels on the lightning node. I mainly just use Strike. 🤷‍♂️

Life hack is try to get 2:1 inbound liquidity to outbound, then things are always flowing

Indeed. Additionally those fee sats spent never will be back😂

It is. I had lightning node running for a year, but I got frustrated with whole experience so I closed all channels and just use a mobile wallet for occasional transactions.

I am loving the similarities between managing liquidity on lightning channels and managing the flow of electrons on power grids. I wonder how long it will take to be equally as important?

Main reason I stopped running my own node. Now using noncustodial Phoenix wallet for all my lightning needs. Still run umbrel for bitcoin/electrs for hodl nunchuck/cc wallet. Future bitcoin adoption will be mostly mobile

Check out Voltage's Flow 2.0, announced yesterday. It's a solid step in the direction of automating all that (: