You're welcome 😁

Yeah I can't recommend routing to anyone that's wanting to do it casually. Even a small routing node requires a lot of attention and you'll likely not make a profit. You really need a lot of technical skills to pull it off, like writing scripts that automate things or analyze the network to find channel opportunities that might be lucrative. Just opening random channels to plebs doesn't really cut it (that's mostly what I did).

I didn't lose much, but that was also when I could open channels for 1 sat/vb. The random force closures are what really killed it for me though. I would have a force closure cost me a few thousand sats and at the rate I was routing it would take a month to recover it, then I'd have another 2 weeks later.

I was also worried about my own reliability running on a ras pi with potentially not perfect internet. I'm sure some force closures were my fault too. They only happen when a payment gets stuck somehow (don't know the exact details), so it shouldn't be a problem with private channels that don't constantly have transactions flowing on them.

Also, I don't think I was even much use to the network. A lot of the activity was other nodes using me to rebalance their own channels. If I turned up fees I wouldn't route anything, and when they were low I couldn't keep my channels balanced because everyone around me was charging higher fees and rebalancing wasn't economical. All I felt like I was doing was subsidizing more successful nodes.

Anyway that's the story in case you needed more convincing not to mess with routing 😅