I'm 🤏this close to deleting every #GetAlby product I use.
The channel I didn't need and unintentionally paid 16k sats for closed on me as soon as it opened. I just don't know what to say.
Discussion
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Not the best ad for their product
I used Alby for ages , recently setup Alby Hub to migrate my wallet , opened channels only for them to closed during the fee surge recently.
Alby Hub also constantly logged me out thus disabling all functionality.
The whole system started to feel like a confusing honeypot.
So I closed my remaining channels , shutdown the Hub and deleted my account.
Alby did not close any channel. Alby Hub recommends LSPs but you do not have any Alby channel.
And channel closure issues is something that all lightning teams are working on (LND, LDK, etc.) We put a lot of effort in trying to optimize this - also recommending those LSPs where we know that they work hard on providing good channel availability.
That's the state that lightning is still in and can not fully be prevented just yet in a decentralized, diverse network.
Alby Hub is also not "logging out" your system might stop/restart it which requires an unlock again to decrypt the data.
hope this clarifies some things. if you don't like it, that's fine... - actually the great thing of the open network that people can choose the tool what works for them. :) - just wanted to provide some help/clarification here.
Do you run your own node? If not we could experiment with the Uncle Jim model and I can 'host' your lightning wallet on my node. LMK if you would want to try.
Yes I have my own node. I just installed albyhub on it yesterday in an attempt to give it another shot and ended up buying a lightning channel I didn't need ( cuz my node already has them ) while clicking around to trying to figure it out.
today I got back on and noticed the email got on alby hub and confirmed my lightning channel wasn't there.
I restarted albyhub and noticed it finally detected my umbrel nodes channels properly but the closed channel I paid for was obviously not coming back.
That is a definite bummer.
which LSP did you use? we don’t run the LSPs. but this is likely a wrong email. could it be that you tried to open a public channel from a LSP that does not support it?
in that case you also did not pay.
I've inspected this further and also chatted with the LSP.
You are having a self-hosted hub there, your Alby account is connected. I see a lot of restarts of your hub there. It even looks here like you have started the Alby Hub twice in parallel. I think the hub does not protect against this, yet. But this for sure causes problems due to the nature of how nodes connect and manage state.
One channel was closed by your node actually (which indicates that there was an issue running the node).
Where do you run this hub?
And actually if you don't want or need a self-custodial lightning node, then there is no point in running it. At the state that we and lightning is at there will be some channels involved and an assumption is you want to connect to the network otherwise you would not run it.
Thanks for the info. I had installed and restored my hub on my umbrel. I thought I had turned off any other instances, I had my original instance in a docker container not on my umbrel so it’s possible the container was restarted somehow.
I’ve accepted the fact that this was user error (me) i wasn’t even bothered that the channel was closed as much as the funds migration thing I mentioned.
I’m kinda glad it closed, it left no more reason to keep the hub.
just trying to investigate what happened and how it can be improved.
so I appreciate that feedback.