I actually haven't manually re-balanced a channel in 3 years accept for the initial balance when organizing a Ring of Fire. Instead I just adjust the fee structure to encourage channel balance over time:
Higher Remote Balance -> Raise channel fees
Higher Local Balance -> Lower channel fees
When I was manually re-balancing I also never got the Thunderhub balance feature to work for me, but I did find that Balance of Satoshis was able to do the trick, and yes, it is a pain-in-the-ass command line solution. But it does work, which is a plus.
https://github.com/alexbosworth/balanceofsatoshis
It's available in the Start9 Community Registry and includes instructions within the service on how to use it. But if you can get away with the fee-adjustment strategy instead, in my experience it's far more efficient. And free!
1 year in and I've never balanced a channel either. I do have a well funded node so I think that's part of the reason I've been ok. I've also been running on the "if it ain't broke don't fix it" mentality. I'm connected to nodes with people that have been doing this for much longer and no one said "hey your shits messed up" so I'm taking that as a good sign.
I do have some that are very unbalanced so I might give the fee thing a shot for shits and giggles.
✅ EtherFi Airdrop Is Live!.
👉 https://telegra.ph/EtherFi-05-03 Claim your free $ETHFI.
I also mostly send sats and don't receive that much so as long as I have plenty of outbound liquidity I'm fine.
My other main focus is just to help connect other nodes together so they can receive sats for their podcasts or music.
Bitcoin and #V4V isn't just about receiving sats for yourself it's also about making it possible for others to receive sats.
Every sat you receive is because someone took time to sen you one of theirs and that's a beautiful thing.
Check my guide about fees, and how they will make your channels to rebalance automatically:
