Sure, but at least you have some chance of getting that donation, since donors don't tend to hang around and attempt 15 times. Different market than with direct payments to a supplier or something.

I'd like the ability to have a secondary LN wallet, so that I could keep the self-hosted one up, and it automatically falls back to #Minibits, if the payment doesn't go through or the wallet is offline, or something.

yeah, i think it's a false argument that it solves the liveness problem of lightning at all, i'd say the opposite, cashu mints are probably more likely to be of lower quality (at this point) and even in ideal circumstances, they are just as prone to downtime, at least, as a lightning channel (which is one or both nodes in a channel down) which even sorta suggests that the cashu mint may be actually less stable, since where lightning channel failure is a 1 out of 4 probability the offline probability grid for cashu mint is 1 out of 2 (because it's only one)

oh, sure, you could have a dns round robin or you could have a loadbalancer but that itself is a centralization vulnerability, in both cases

i think that a strategy for failover for lightning nodes would be a great thing to have exist... such as a backup that heartbeat broadcasts proof it can maintain a given channel end and the peer falls back to it in such a case. and the backup can act as a mirror, just needs a sync protocol, and it could act as a signed broadcast message

when i was working with the Steem protocol there was this possibility to set up a peer to sign over to another peer to cover for a particular pubkey that was in the stake-to-validate race, i could cook up such a cryptographic scheme so that it is even less noisy, one node syncs state to another(s) and a protocol for a takeover message to move the channel addresses to a new IP