would make a lot of sense for communities to have their own mint
Discussion
I agree. We already have deep zap integrations in Ditto that nobody really knows about. We have zap splits to the site staff, essentially answering the "why would anyone run a relay" question. It makes sense in this system. But there are still many hurdles to overcome.
zaps/lightning make sense when you have a zero-trust environment between parties (like a wide open global social network). if you have a trust relationship with your community it makes sense to have zero-setup wallet onboarding via ecash because its simpler. cross-mint you still need zaps, otherwise you have to deal with wallet multi-mint stuff which I think is a bad path to go down due to managing dubious trust relationships with ecash from foreign mints.
it is still an open question whether its worth having the complexity of two zap implementations for the subtly different things. ideally it would just be better to generalize the zaps spec to something other than bolt11 invoices. like just use an amount + currency field instead of hardcoding to bolt11, since you are trusting the zapper anyways.