Sounds like literally any other crypto to me. They’re all distributed networks, that’s the point. So unless you’re using some novel definition of the word “intermediary”, Bitcoin and lightning aren’t any better than anything else - at least on that specific front.

Also, this issue seems client agnostic. It’s all slow and all prone to spam. I don’t mind cli, I spend a lot of my time in the terminal, it’s the loading times that are out of control. And all just to see a bunch of Chinese spam and Bitcoin maxis proselytize to each other. I haven’t seen one funny thing here, except perhaps the meta humor of the platform as a whole.

Like I said, I’m not going to write it off entirely, but there needs to be more on the table for me to start recommending it to people.